MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Dmitry Kosyrev) - On December 7, it will be 65 years since Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. On September 11, it was five years since the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York.
These dates will go down in history in parallel. There are many reasons for this apart from numerical similarity.
For all its tragic consequences, Pearl Harbor symbolized what the United States regarded as the beginning of the "American century" until recently. Before December 1941, America was an isolationist state which had barely recovered after the Great Depression. However, it emerged from WWII as the world's strongest power, and retaliated against the Japanese aggressors with the first nuclear strikes in the history of mankind.
To the contrary, September 11 signals the beginning of the end of the incomplete "American century". It seemed that subsequent events would show to the world that nobody could play jokes with America. What they in fact demonstrated was something different - that it is possible to spend on defense more than the European Union, Russia, and China put together, and still fail to win a war against a much weaker country.
Until the war in Iraq, the U.S. was referred to as the only superpower, but after Iraq this expression gradually disappeared.
In both cases, the U.S. was subjected to undisguised aggression and came up with a powerful response. It is possible to say that in 1941 the U.S. committed several mistakes. Thus, it imposed an oil embargo on Japan, but was not prepared for the consequences of this decision. In 2001, as one could have guessed at least theoretically, an unprecedented onslaught of U.S. foreign policy was capable of triggering off a surprise reaction. Any aggression is aggression, no matter what the motives are. But the results were quite different.
After September 11, the U.S. repeatedly recalled Pearl Harbor to prove that America is great at parrying an attack. But the events followed the Vietnam scenario. Although the U.S. losses in the Iraqi war are almost 20 times smaller than in Vietnam, America sustained a second defeat from its own society, which did not accept this war and passed a verdict on the Republicans in November. After Pearl Harbor anything like that was impossible to imagine.
American society is much smarter than some would like to think. It does not like falsehoods and cheating. After Pearl Harbor America fought those who attacked it, and where it was attacked (in the Pacific). Only later it fought against Japan's allies in Europe.
After September 11, it started a war against those who gave shelter to the aggressor (the Taliban in Afghanistan) but spread this war to Iraq, a country, which had nothing to do with the attack. America acted exactly the same as it did in Vietnam, when the war, especially in the air, spread from the south to the north, then across the borders to Laos and Cambodia, and the end was nowhere near.
The U.S. failed to convince its own people and other countries that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks, or that it was producing weapons of mass destruction. Both statements were false. The war party in the Bush Administration tried to take advantage of the shock into which the Americans and their allies were plunged by September 11 to resolve completely unrelated conflicts.
The allies and friends - Russia, for one - did not believe Washington from the very start or a little later, while the American public hesitated the longest. Yet, the American voters made their choice between the two anniversaries last fall.
There are many other parallels between the two events. In both cases the actions by the aggressor were suicidal - literally in the case of 9/11, and in a figurative sense in Pearl Harbor. In 1941, America was not Japan's main target. On December 8, Tokyo also declared war on the world's only superpower of that time - Great Britain - and attacked its territory in South East Asia. The U.S., as well as the Soviet Union (against which Tokyo was also considering action), was in the background.
Clearly, the Japanese strategists had overrated their forces, just like the terrorists did not achieve quite the result they wanted from the destruction of the Twin Towers.
Finally, in both cases we are dealing with the war-accelerated change of superpowers. In mid 1940s, America emerged as the world's leader also because the previous superpower - Britain - was exhausted by the war it had won. Today's developments are similar to that. China is rapidly moving to the world leadership not only by its own efforts but also because America is becoming exhausted physically and morally in the doomed Iraqi venture.
Who knows - maybe, the U.S. would have surpassed Britain without the war, and China may become the world's economic and political leader without Iraq, but in both cases the change of superpowers is very quick and dramatic - it's a matter of several years.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and may not necessarily represent the opinions of the editorial board
