A day that will live in infamy

War victors write history. Happily, historiography in time allows analytical consensus and a broad ownership of communal wisdom. Thus, Dec. 7’s Day of Infamy 70 years ago that lifted U.S.’ emotions to militant heights, a masterful instance of great literary coinage, has historians judging the attack on Pearl Harbor to be not surprising nor unmitigated. The geopolitics of oil in the last century makes it very clear that the black fluid on the ground is more than just a smudge on the garage floor as it has been the raison d’etre of imperial nation-states.

Oil and the combustion engine in war proved to be a volatile combination. England’s admiralty gave up coal for oil to become the world’s most powerful Navy in 1912. The German Reich’s industrial power produced quality steel but Westminster settled for wealth in financial books. Resource poor Germany courted the Ottoman Empire’s resource, finding black gold in Basra while surveying a highway to connect to Bonn. But England and France in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the Ottoman lands between them, frustrating the German empire’s building designs.

Two thousand years before, Zoroaster revered the eternal fire from natural gas, British surveyors with the Shah of Iran in 1908 hit petroleum fields that proved to be the most critical resource to England when the Guns of August was triggered by the Sarajevo assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. World War I between the Allies (Britain, France, and Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) was over power, fueled and decided by access to oil.

The “seven sisters” (now only four) inked the Achnacarry (Scotland) agreement of 1928, the first oligopolistic commercial control on the price and the production of oil.

Historian Samuel Elliot Morison writes in The Rising Sun in the Pacific that the U.S. oil embargo order of July 1941 “made war with Japan inevitable,” resulting in a “general impoverishment” economy threatened with insufficient oil for “normal domestic consumption.” Japan’s Meiji, already heading toward empire with its hakko ichiu (one Asia) philosophy, and a Manchukuo migration policy to the non-Han Qing dynasty domain, was too dependent on U.S. oil; the embargo practically put a noose on Japan’s neck, daring it to plunge its own katana (samurai’s short sword) into ignominious seppuku.

Japan’s military and Zaibatsu (precursor to today’s Keiretsu), instead, designed a self-sufficiency plan by accessing China’s coal resources and reaching out to the Dutch East Indies’ BP held oilfields.

The U.S. Pacific naval fleet stood in the way. Harvard-educated Admiral Yamamoto of the Imperial Navy, ironically the master navigator into Oahu’s sugarcane fields and Pearl Harbor, was opposed to the China incursion and aggression against the U.S., vis-a-vis the aggressive and rambunctious members of the Imperial Army that consigned the Navy to troop carriers and plotted the 1931 Mukden incident in Manchukuo. A schizoid Japan in 1941 went tora, tora, tora into Aloha, and the knowledgeable quietly hid their tears while obediently engaging in the misplaced banzai exercise.

Wall Street acts like London’s financial district at the British empire’s sunset years. With Washington in its pocket, it lulled a society into thinking that consumption is fulfillment in a suburban home with a two-car garage, adults talking on their Androids while monitoring the movements of 2.5 children watching HDTV, all paid for by the phantom wealth of its institutions’ in oligopolistic control of the worlds’ financial system.

The day of infamy casts a long shadow. Former U.S. VP Cheney in a 1999 speech echoes the sentiment: “… there will be an annual growth in global oil demand over the years along with a natural decline in production…So where is the oil coming from?…many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies…” The Bush foreign policy that saw conflagration in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a hyped frenzy over terrorism, proceeded from this sentiment. It also explains recent North Africa and the Middle East events.

Cheney added: “Oil is the only large industry whose leverage has not been all that effective in the political arena. We need to earn credibility to have our views heard.” Ex-Haliburton (the world’s largest energy and military services corporations) CEO Cheney would be pleased with the current lobby. OWS is a primal scream to the cheapening of the 237-year-old experiment in U.S. governance.

Western press bemoans politicians’ visit to Yasukuni where World War II criminals are enshrined, and invoke the day of infamy theme. Historians’ assessment provides the other side of the coin, of acts taken by desperate men whose seppuku was occasioned by razors handed them so they can get on with their demise.

Europe and the U.S. are gas guzzlers. Japan joined; China kowtowed “by your leave.” But U.S. foreign policy, not unlike Britain’s to Germany in the last century, denies China’s access to Middle East, African, and South African oil. Its military might is positioned in defense of maritime lanes on South China Sea islands that hold a barrel and some. That’s like Saddam holding WMDs!

We shan’t repeat history. My call.

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[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the [/I]Saipan Tribune’[I]s Opinion Section[/I]