ABSTRACT
I take it that what we are celebrating today – or commemorating, rather, though to judge by the America media this week celebrating might be the more appropriate word – is not the Japanese sneak attack, or if one wants to be slightly more polite about it, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, but the beginning of what was, after all, a major war. Surprise attacks are a pretty common way of starting wars, as somebody pointed out in the New York Times recently. The chief thing to be said about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is that, as a surprise attack, along with Israel’s destruction of the Egyptian air force in 1967, it was one of the most successful in modern times.
