President Roosevelt was a wartime president as is President Bush.  Although there were many incidents leading up to the involvement of the United States in either war, neither Roosevelt nor Bush can be said to have inherited the war. Both Presidents led the country into war.  It is the intent of this essay to explore the leadership styles of each president as the threats of war became more manifest, and as we became actively involved in war

President Roosevelt’s National Defense Policies
         President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office  in March 1933 at a time of a world wide depression, acute in the United States. World War I had destabilized the world. Communism in Russia, Fascism in Italy and Naziism in Germany were all outcomes of the war. The war because of its unspeakable brutality and mortality resulted in pacifism in all the European powers including Germany at least initially, and to isolationism in the United States.  The Versailles Treaty imposed a harsh and vindictive peace on Germany that violated important provisions of the Fourteen Points of President Wilson that Germany had been led to believe would be the basis of the peace treaty to end the war.
         When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated President, World War II was already on the way but the newly inaugurated President took little notice of it, and made no mention of it in his inaugural address. However, the Japanese were on the move in Asia  having already invaded Manchuria, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo there. Roosevelt took no action there even though his Secretary of War, Henry Simpson wanted to at least impose economic sanctions against Japan. In Europe Adolph Hitler came into power nearly simultaneously with President Roosevelt. In his book Mein Kampf, written in 1925-6 ,Hitler laid out his plans for Germany’s need for lebensraum (living room) in the East, i.e. Poland and Russia, and his harsh feelings toward the Jews.  There is no evidence that the book influenced Roosevelt’s policies toward Germany and  the persecution of the Jews in the 1930's.
         As mentioned above, the country and the Congress were profoundly isolationist and desperately wanted to stay out of war.  Not as widely understood, perhaps, is that Roosevelt himself also was profoundly anti-war until the invasion of France in 1940.  Even after the invasion of Poland by Germany and Russia, and the British and French declaration of war on Germany, in a speech made on  September 21, 1939  Roosevelt considered himself to be, in his own words, part of the peace bloc.  In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, in 1936 Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, in 1937 Japan invaded China, in 1938 Germany invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, in 1939 Germany and Russia invaded Poland and in 1940 Germany invaded Norway, Denmark,  Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.  President Roosevelt’s actions during these years that Winston Churchill referred to as the gathering storm are worth examining.
         The sinking of the plainly  marked U.S. Gunboat Panay in the Yangtze river by Japanese aircraft in 1937 causing  loss of life was an act of war against the United States.    The President was outraged but accepted the Japanese apology and explanation that it was a mistake, which of course it wasn’t.  There is no evidence he threatened the Japanese with military action or any other action if it happened again. It is true that the Congress and the country wanted to avoid war.  So did the President.
         In September 1938,  prior to the Munich Conference about Czechoslovakia , Roosevelt sent separate letters addressed to the European Heads of State and to Hitler urging all parties to continue to negotiate and seek a peaceful resolution of the problem which was, after all caused by German aggression and demands that the Sudetenland  in Czechoslovakia  be turned over to German sovereignty.    In August 1939,  just prior to the German invasion of Poland, Roosevelt again  wrote a personal letter to Hitler urging Germany and Poland to solve their dispute “by direct negotiation; second, by submission of these controversies to an impartial arbitration in which they can both have confidence; or, third, that they agree to the solution of these controversies through the procedure of conciliation.”  In neither letter to Hitler was there the slightest hint that the United States government opposed German Aggression  nor was there any threat of serious consequences if Germany persisted in its aggression against its neighbors.   President Roosevelt supported and signed the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1937 and 1939.  In a speech on September 3, 1939, President Roosevelt remained resolutely against war: “I have said not once but  many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.  I hope the United States  will keep out of this war. I believe that it  will.”
           It is of course difficult to discern the President’s real views for many reasons including the fact that he was widely regarded as being rather duplicitous.  From the public record Roosevelt began to change his views after Germany’s invasion of Western Europe in May 1940, especially the lightning collapse and surrender of France. In an address to Congress on May 16  he spelled out the vulnerabilities of the United States to outside attack and/or internal subversion, and proposed large increases in military spending. On May 26 by radio he advised the American people of the need for a stronger national defense.  Since the fall Presidential election was coming up he also took the opportunity to advise the American public how much  he and his administration had already done to provide for national security.
         In the fall of 1940 the position of the Congress and the American people still was to stay out of the war. The earliest significant anti-war movement was the Keep America Out of War Congress was  founded in 1938 by socialist Norman Thomas and others mostly identified with the political Left. The more powerful and better known anti-war movement was the America First Committee founded in September 1940.  The Executive Board included among its members; Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Eddie Rickenbacker, Henry Ford, Lillian Gish, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Herbert Hoover and Norman Thomas.   Although its nearly one million members came largely from the populist Midwest it developed strong support from both the political Left and the political Right. The most prominent voice of the America First movement was the American hero Charles Lindbergh, also with a Midwest populist heritage, to whom President Roosevelt took a great personal dislike calling him a Nazi.   Unfortunately Lindbergh had sullied his anti-war views   with some frankly anti-Semitic statements at a speech in Des Moines in 1941.  This brought significant discredit to Lindbergh as well as the America First Committee.
         In the fall campaign of 1940 President Roosevelt continued to talk resolutely against  war.  In Boston on October 30 he said; “I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”  Late in the campaign he expressed  similar sentiments at other times in other places.  In the event the President was elected to a historic third term on the slogan  don’t change horses in the middle of the stream.   Unfortunately by this time the country was not only in the middle of the stream but the stream was deep and the water becoming very swift.  Long before the election President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had initiated a correspondence while Churchill was still  First Lord of the Admiralty.  In this correspondence Roosevelt made clear to Churchill that the United States would come to the assistance of Great Britain in the war.
 Following the election the President also made clear to Congress his desire to help Great Britain  while at the same time avoiding war, unless directly attacked.  This latter consideration turned out to be the operative consideration, as we shall see.  In a speech on December 29, that has become known as the Arsenal of Democracy speech,  President Roosevelt made clear that it still was his policy to avoid war.  At the same time he also made it clear that the Nazi regime was an evil regime and that it was in our national interest to help Great Britain defend itself and make  sure that Germany did not win the war.  He was, of course, correct in this assessment.  In his stated view  we would accomplish this not by going to war but by becoming, in his words, the arsenal of democracy.  We indeed did become the Arsenal of Democracy.
         The major mechanism to accomplish this was through Lend-Lease.  The Lend-Lease Act passed Congress March 11, 1941 but not without considerable debate and the opposition was bi-partisan.  Congress was still, in the main, against getting involved in the European war and wrote into the Lend-lease Act a strong prohibition against the U.S. Navy convoying merchant ships carrying contraband to belligerents during a war in which we profess our neutrality
 In August 1941 President Roosevelt met secretly with British Prime Minister Churchill at Argentia  Bay in Newfoundland.  At this meeting, which has become known as the Atlantic Conference, Roosevelt committed the United States to help defeat the Axis powers.   The strategy was two-fold 1) send all the necessary military aid to Great Britain and, now that Germany had attacked Russia, to the Soviet Union as well and 2) enter the war if attacked.  By sending so much military aid to the belligerents Britain and Russia and providing convoy escort duty with U.S. Navy ships Roosevelt tried to provoke Hitler but Hitler wisely refused to take the bait.
         In the Pacific Theater the record is clear.  The United  States put Japan into a situation where they would either have to capitulate to our demands and give up their militaristic imperialistic ambitions, i.e. to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, or militarily break our oil and war material embargoes by attacking the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands.  They made the mistake of choosing the latter alternative.  However, it took nearly four years of bloodshed for this mistake to become fully manifest.
         President Roosevelt’s policy of waiting until attacked before going to war became very clear at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines.  To our military commanders at Pearl Harbor the policy was made explicit.  The messages sent to these installations in late November 1941 stressed the following “1) This is a War Warning, 2) Negotiations with Japan have ceased, 3) An aggressive move by Japan is expected in any direction in a few days, 4) Invasion of the Philippines, the Kra  Peninsula  or Borneo expected, 5) Execute an appropriate defensive deployment, 6) The United States policy calls for Japan to make the first overt  act, 7) Before Japan strikes undertake necessary reconnaissance and 8) Do not alarm the civilian population or disclose intent.”  Nothing in this and other communications to the commanders at Pearl Harbor suggested an attack in the Hawaiian Islands.  Rather the Philippines were thought to be the likely target.  The Japanese attacked both Pearl Harbor and our military installations in the Philippines on December 7, and on December 8 Congress declared  war on Japan.  Hitler simplified Roosevelt’s problem on fully entering the European war by foolishly declaring war on the United States on December 11.  The United States was now fully committed to a war that was  truly world in scope that would last until August 1945.

President Bush’s National Defense Policies
         In contrast to President Roosevelt, who had been in office eight years before the Pearl Harbor attack, President Bush had been in office not quite eight months when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Al Qaeda occurred, marking  the beginning of what is now increasingly referred to as World War IV.  Both World War II and World War IV had antecedents.  In Roosevelt’s case they occurred mostly during his administration while in the case of Bush they occurred during the previous administrations.
         Although World War IV is most commonly referred to as a  war on terror,  Militant Islam, in the form  of Al Qaeda,  declared war on the United States in 1998, and directly attacked the United States mainland on September 11, 2001.  Al Qaeda   has declared this war to be a holy war on behalf on Islam, and in its own eyes it is that and it is being waged by jihad.  For good reasons, President Bush and our government cannot declare the war to be against Islamists.  There are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and it is not known how many are sympathetic to the message of the Islamists, nor how many  would be prepared or induced to wage jihad, holy war, against Western interests.  The President well understands why it is not in the national interests of the United States for the Islamic world, especially moderate Muslims around the world, to come to believe that this is a holy war against all of Islam.  However, the religious nature of the struggle we are in is a fact.
         When  Governor Bush campaigned against Vice-President Al Gore for the presidency in the fall of 2000 terrorism was not an issue for either candidate.  When newly elected President George Bush gave his inaugural address on January 20 he made no mention of either terrorism or Al Qaeda.  We now know that threats from Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations were discussed between the outgoing and incoming administrations, and that the incoming Bush Administration in the short eight months it had been in office before the attack on the World Trade Center was actively making plans on how best to confront the issue of world terrorism.
         The magnitude and brazenness of the attacks by Al Qaeda on 9/11combined with the display of organization and sophistication literally astonished everyone. President Bush immediately decided  and so stated that these attacks were acts of war, and would be dealt with on that basis.
 At that time Al Qaeda had a home base and sanctuary in Afghanistan which was governed by the Taliban.  On September 20, nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. In this address the President demanded of the Taliban that it deliver to U.S. authorities all the leaders of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, permanently close all the terrorist training camps, dismantle their support structure and hand over all the terrorists.  The threat was that if the Taliban failed to do these things immediately it would suffer the same fate as the terrorists.  The President also provided a firm deadline to meet these demands.
         The Taliban refused these demands. On orders from President Bush military action based largely on a small number of U.S. Special Forces together with the Northern Alliance, an Afghani resistance  group, was taken and swiftly removed the Taliban from power and largely if not completely drove Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. Within weeks  Kabul, the Capital, fell soon to be followed by the rest of the country. Swift as this was it was not quick enough to prevent the chattering classes, including the New York Times to claim quagmire and to talk endlessly about the failure of the Russians and much earlier the British to defeat the warlike Afghani tribesmen.
         In these early days after 9/11 the United States was truly united in a way it had not been since the Pearl Harbor attack sixty years earlier. Flags and signs such as God Bless America, United We Stand and Proud to be an American  were prominently displayed on buildings, billboards, cars, trucks and even road overpasses. When President Bush gave his second State of the Union address on January 20, 2002 what a difference a few months had made.  The war on terror , which Bush had in effect defined as a war without asking Congress to declare war, was  the focal point of the speech.  The President  made clear in his speech that the war in Afghanistan was the beginning and far from the end of the war.  He also stated clearly what would become known as the Bush policy of preemption: “We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons”
 In this second State of the Union address, President Bush also looked beyond  Afghanistan to highlight other threats we face.  He defined Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an Axis of Evil that threatens the peace of the world by seeking or having weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and correctly called attention to the possibilities that terrorist organizations may obtain WMD from these countries.  He had these specific words to say about Iraq:
            “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.”
         The current world situation is complicated by the presence of weapons of mass destruction (chemical biological, nuclear), rogue states currently with or with aspirations for these weapons and  trans-national Islamist terrorist organizations with ties to these and other  nations with these weapons.   It is well understood that such weapons in the hands of Islamist terrorist waging asymmetric warfare could make the attack on the World Trade Center look small indeed.  Such weapons in the hands of terrorists in an  Islamic world full of all kind of grievances against  a relatively rich West waging asymmetric warfare goes a long way to equalize the economic and military power disparities between the Islamic world and the West.
         A unity of purpose was much in evidence in the United States for the first two years after the World Trade Center attack. In October 2001 Congress passed and the President signed the Patriot Act which gave much needed new powers to law enforcement agencies to fight terrorism both at home and abroad. The Homeland Security Department was established by an act of Congress in November 2002 and became operational in January 2003.
 In June, 2002 President Bush gave an address to the graduating cadets at the West Point Military Academy in which he further spelled out his policy of preemption.  He pointed out that the cold war doctrines of deterrence and containment are no longer operative in the current environment of international terror, weapons of mass destruction and asymmetric warfare, and we can no longer defend America by just hoping for the best.  Further, the battle must be taken to the enemy so we are able to confront developing threats before they become fully apparent and thus able to disrupt the planning and operations of our enemies. This is the Bush policy of preemption to go with the Bush doctrine that if a country is not with the United States in this war on terror and gives aid and comfort to the terrorists, we will consider them allied with the terrorists and treat them accordingly.
         Still another issue centrally involved in the war on terror is the Palestinian-Israeli struggle  and the Intifada.  Although Jews have lived continuously in what we call Palestine for over a millennium they have been in a minority for the most part since the Islamic conquest in the seventh century.  President Bush engaged the issue fully in the speech he gave on June 24, 2002.  He laid out his thoughts in a logical and coherent framework, and the principles he annunciated  at that time  remain U.S. policy on this issue.  The President called, for the first time by an American President, for a separate state of Palestine to be established living in peace side by side with Israel.  However, for this outcome to come about there were some requirements. There needs to be new Palestinian leadership since in the view of the United States, Yasser Arafat has failed completely as a leader of the Palestinian people. There needs to be a complete renunciation of terror and a dismantling of the Islamist terrorist organizations. There needs to be established a legislative body with the authority typically associated with such bodies in a Parliamentary democracy, and a rule of law. New Palestinian leadership and government needs to be elected freely by the Palestinian people. Israeli forces need to withdraw to positions held prior to September 28, 2000, and Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank and Gaza must stop.
         All these conditions must be met before final status negotiations begin on the status of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinians refugees to Israel proper.  The right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state within defensible borders must be accepted and so stated by Palestinian authorities.  A revision of the Palestinian Charter reflecting this remains in draft form, not yet receiving final approval.  Even with Yasser Arafat gone from the scene, the Palestinian Israeli dispute remains very far from a resolution.
         On the larger issue of the war on Islamist terrorism including the war in Iraq, this  remains very much on the President’s mind as well in Congress and with the American people. After the 1991 first Gulf war Iraq was disarmed to some extent and its weapons  programs dismantled as much as possible. However, when UN weapon Inspections stopped in 1998 it was clear that Saddam Hussain and his government still had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had retained the ability to re-institute his nuclear program after sanctions stopped. In 1991 economic sanctions had been imposed that were designed to force compliance.  What they did instead  was to cause hardship to the Iraqi people. In addition, dissident Shia in the south and Kurds in the north were brutally assaulted by Iraqi forces to such an extent that the United States instituted no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, patrolled constantly by U.S. aircraft, to prevent Iraq from having the ability to use military means to suppress people in these regions of the country. To relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people an oil for food program was instituted to allow Iraq to use oil revenue for food and medical supplies.  We now know that this program was seriously corrupted and this corruption and smuggling diverted $20 billion into the coffers of Saddam Hussein which he used for his own purposes including funding terrorism and paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel and building many opulent palaces.
         In the summer and fall of 2002 it became clear that President Bush was increasingly giving serious consideration to the problem Iraq poses, and the possibility that military action will  be necessary. This should have come as no surprise to any one since the previous Clinton administration and the Congress had in 1998 declared the U.S. policy toward Iraq to be one of regime change and the removal of Saddam Hussain and his Baath party from power.
 On September 12, 2002, one year and a day after 9/11 President Bush went to the United Nations and addressed the issue of Iraq being a major threat to world peace.  The President’s case against Iraq was resting on many considerations.  One was Saddam Hussain’s failure to comply with numerous Security council resolutions since the ending of the first Gulf war in 1991.   Another was  the serious and repeated human rights violations against the Iraqi people by the Iraqi government and Saddam himself .An additional consideration was the fact that Iraq had failed to renounce terrorism and was allowing terrorists and terrorist organizations to operate freely and unhindered in Iraq.  This was in violation of Security Council resolutions.  The last was the undisputed facts at that time that Iraq had mass destruction weapons and  programs ,including nuclear, that it had failed to disclose and dismantle, and stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that it had failed to disclose and dispose of.
         In response to this and considerable discussion within the Security Council, resolution 1441 was passed unanimously.  This resolution acknowledged all the charges leveled against Iraq by the President.  It went on to determine that Iraq was in material breech of its obligations to comply with previously issued resolutions and stated that serious consequences would result if Iraq continues to defy the United Nations.  A new UN inspection regime was establish to monitor Iraqi compliance and disclosure requirements.  This call for action was emphasized by President Bush in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union speech.
 Iraq failed to comply even minimally with the demands of resolution 1441.  At the request of Prime Minister Blair the United States and Great Britain went back to the Security Council and asked for a resolution that would explicitly authorize military action against Iraq even though both countries took the position that the threat of serious action in 14441 had already authorised such action.  Led by active opposition by France, Russia, China and Germany the resolution failed.  The world now knows that business dealings and financial arrangements between Iraq and some of these countries that opposed the second resolution is why it failed.
         On March 19, 2003 President Bush announced that military action against Iraq had begun. By April 9, a mere three weeks later Baghdad was occupied by U.S. troops.   At the request of the commanding Officer General Tommy Franks, Bush announced on May 1 that major combat action had ceased. Unfortunately, a deadly insurgency led by former members of the governing Baathist party, members of Saddam Hussain’s Special Republican Guard and Islamist foreign fighters continues to this day. Saddam Hussain was captured by U.S. forces on December 13 as had been most of his regime members before him.  The insurgency has been deadly for U.S. forces but even more deadly  for Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians who are being especially targeted in order to disrupt the upcoming Iraqi elections.  Iraq is currently being governed by a sovereign interim government with a Shia Prime Minister and a Sunni President.

Comparison of President Roosevelt’s and President Bush’s National Defense Policies
         There are some similarities but also differences in the national security and war issues that Presidents Roosevelt and Bush were confronted with. In both cases a surprise attack on the United States in one case and a United States territory in the other by a determined enemy resulted in war after a gathering storm of events leading up to war had occurred over at least a ten year period.  In the case of Roosevelt the gathering storm occurred in his own administration and by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, Europe and Asia  were already fully involved in World War II.  In the case of Bush the gathering storm had occurred primarily in the previous Clinton administration and World War IV didn’t begin until after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the judgment by President Bush that this was an act of war and that we were now engaged in a war against Islamist terrorists.
         For both the Roosevelt and Bush presidencies the country’s  experiences in a prior war had strengthened anti-war sentiments in the United States.  World War I had resulted in such unspeakable carnage and death that strong pacifist and isolationist sentiments understandably developed in the United States. The anti-war movement remained strong right up until the day of the Pearl Harbor attack and then disappeared as the country became unified in support of the war. The most prominent leader of the America First anti-war movement, Charles Lindbergh,  immediately tried to regain his Army Air Force commission , and when this was denied by the President he eventually went to the Pacific Theater of Operations and helped our pilots improve their flying skills. As a civilian contractor he flew in 50 combat missions.
         In the case of the Bush presidency it was the  country’s experiences in the Vietnam War that fed anti-war sentiments. However, the timing in the occurrence and the circumstances leading up to this anti-war movement were entirely different than sixty years earlier and the events leading up to World War II.  At the time the planes crashed into the World Trade Center there was no anti-war movement to speak of because the public did not perceive a threat of war.  After the attacks on 9/11 the country unified much as it had after the Pearl Harbor attack.  President Bush declared he would take the war to the Enemy and he did so promptly in Afghanistan dislodging the Taliban from power and seriously disrupting Al Qaeda. This met with widespread public approval particularly because it was accomplished in such a short period of time with few casualties.
         The anti-war movement came out in full force in connection with the 2004 Presidential Election and the growing insurgency in Iraq.  The early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination  Howard Dean  came out against the Iraq war and John Kerry, the eventual candidate to capture the nomination moved in Dean’s direction. The delegates to the Democratic Convention in Boston were strongly opposed to the war and the party gave a prominent place at the convention to one of the strongest and most vitriolic anti-war critics of the war, Michael Moore.  In the campaign it was hard to determine where John Kerry stood on the war but in contrast to the anti-war movement in 1940 and 1941, which was bi-partisan ,in 2004 the anti-war movement was strongly, although not exclusively, Democratic.   The President and his party , in the main, saw, and see,  the Iraq war as a necessary part of the war on Islamist terrorists, i.e. World War IV.  The democratic candidate and his party, in the main, saw, and see,  the Iraq war as a blunder, a bad mistake and a distraction from rather than being part of the war on terror.  They saw it, and continue to see it as a  quagmire  worse than Vietnam.  President Bush won the election, in which the Iraq war was a major campaign issue, by three million popular votes and thirty-five electoral votes.
         World War II was a conventional  war between groups of Nation States and the American public well understood how high the stakes were and how important it was  to win the war and defeat the Axis powers. World War IV is an asymmetric non-conventional war where the enemy is not primarily Nation States but is  trans-national in nature with Islamist terrorists waging jihad by fighting us with  non-conventional tactics including suicide bombing. and  roadside improvised explosive devices. These weapons kill civilian and military targets, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, without discrimination. Our  enemy in this war is Militant Islam which has as its goal expanding the Islamic world using the tactics of jihad , i.e. holy war, thus imposing Islamic (Sharia) law over most of the world especially once Islamic lands such as Palestine, or even Spain. This movement of Militant Islam can be seen not only all over the present Islamic world but also in Europe, now referred to in a new book by Bat Ye’or as Eurabia.  Unfortunately the scope and danger of Militant Islam is not fully perceived by large segments of the American public. A recent report by the Central Intelligence Agency on the global future indeed presents a fictional world wide Islamic Caliphate as an interesting hypothesis in contrast to a Pax Americana.
           It is of interest to compare how President Roosevelt and President Bush responded to the national defense and  war issues they each faced in their Presidencies; on the one hand the Axis powers and on the other Islamist terrorism.  President Roosevelt well understood the growing threat to peace posed by Germany and Japan, especially after the Panay attack and the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the aggressive military moves by Germany starting in 1936.  However, he remained firmly opposed to the United States entry into the war  right up until the German invasion of Norway and France in April and May of 1940.   From that point on it is clear that President Roosevelt realized that it was imperative that the United States come to the assistance of Great Britain, and after the German invasion of Russia in June 1941, to the Soviet Union as well.  In this he was of course right and the America First Committee wrong.  However he maneuvered the United States into war by secret negotiation and deception, not through presidential leadership and a determined effort on his part to help the public understand that entering the war was in the national interests of the United States. There is little or no public evidence that President Roosevelt tried to convince the public and opinion makers in the country that it was in our national interest  to enter the war.   The decision to enter the war was made for  us by Japan and Germany in that order.  His public position on Lend-Lease was that our role was  be the Arsenal of Democracy and not become a belligerent. In the Pacific his position and that of his administration was that Japan must make the first overt act of war.  In this, he succeeded .
         After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11 causing more deaths than had the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Bush declared these to be  act sof war and recognized immediately that we were at war with the Islamist terrorists associated with Al Qaeda.  By his orders the United States took  the war to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in very short order. President Bush also recognized that, as part of the war on terror and those governments supporting international terrorism, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq must be destroyed and that military means were  necessary.  In this he was as right as Roosevelt had been sixty years earlier.   The election in Iraq was held on schedule on January 30 with greater than expected participation and widespread jubilation in the streets. Participation was very high in Kurdish and Shia areas but generally low in the so-called  Sunni Triangle.  A Transitional National Assembly (TNA) was elected which will elect a President’s Council which will, in turn, elect a Prime Minister. The TNA must approve the Prime Minister and draft a permanent Constitution.  The Constitution will be voted on in a country-wide referendum in October 2005.

Conclusion
         President Roosevelt is generally credited with skillfully leading the country into World  War II against widespread isolationism in the country and in Congress.  The truth is a little more complicated.  He opposed the participation of the United States in a declared  war unless directly attacked right up until the Pearl Harbor attack.  His public position was that we were to be the Arsenal of Democracy by which we would supply aid to Great Britain and, after June of 1941 also to the Soviet Union, and let them do the fighting.  In his private messages to Churchill and later at the Atlantic Conference he unequivocally committed the United States to assist Great Britain in the destruction of Nazi Germany.  These private assurances were not communicated to either the American people or the Congress.  During the negotiations with Congress concerning Lend Lease Roosevelt continually gave assurances to Congress that it was his intention to avoid war while he was provoking Hitler to attack our Navy on convoy duty in the Atlantic.  President Roosevelt’s policy in the Pacific theater of operation was to provoke the Japanese into committing  the first overt act of war. On December 7, 1941 the Japanese accommodated the President.  Germany then declared war on the United States several days later.
         President Roosevelt was faced with an isolationist Congress and country from the beginning of his administration until the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, there is no record in his public utterances of any attempt to prepare the country or the Congress for the active participation of the United States in the war as a belligerent.  His stated objective was to avoid war unless directly attacked.
         In President Bush’s case the precipitating event, the 9/11 attack, which has been compared to Pearl Harbor, occurred at the beginning of his administration.  In Bush’s case there was no anti-war movement at that time and very little anti-war sentiment developed when Afghanistan was invaded, the Taliban routed and Al Qaeda displaced.  The war was short and successful.  However, a strong anti-war movement developed when Bush took preemptive action against Iraq, a terrorist state and which had been declared to be a national security risk by the previous Clinton Administration. The anti-war views of the democratic opposition became stronger as the 2004 election drew closer.  However, President Bush never wavered in his defense of his war policy and in defense of the Bush Doctrine and his policy of preemption.  The successful election in Afghanistan in October, his reelection in November and the successful election in Iraq on January 30, 2005 have gone a long way to vindicating his war leadership. President Roosevelt  led the country into a declared war primarily by diplomacy and deception.   President Bush led the nation into war primary by diplomacy and preemption.

         The military historian Elliot Cohen recently offered the opinion that the current “war on terror”may be considered to be World War IV with the “Cold War”, the struggle from 1945 until 1991 between the Soviet Union and its allies and the Western Democracies led by the United States considered as World War III.  World War II was of course the titanic struggle between the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan against the Allied powers United States, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). World War IV  is the historic asymmetric conflict we are now engaged in between the Western Democracies, again led by the United States, and a worldwide jihad against the West by Militant Islam, also referred to as Islamism.
 Although  the United States did not formally enter WWII until Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on December 7, 1941 it was clear that war was coming many years before that. The United States previously had been directly and overtly attacked by Japan in 1937 when Japanese aircraft attacked and sunk with loss of life the U.S. Gunboat  Panay and two Standard Oil tankers in the Yangtze river. The United States was engaged in an undeclared war with German submarines in the North Atlantic before the Pearl Harbor attack as well.

      An expansion of Cohen’s concept of the “war on terror, i.e. the war between the Western democracies and Militant Islam as World War IV is provided by Norman Podhoretz in the September 2004 issue of Commentary Magazine.  This is an  article entitled World War IV; How it Started, What it Means, and Why we Have to Win.  In this article Podhoretz makes a comparison of World War IV with the “Cold War,” i.e. World War III.  In 1947 what became known as the Truman Doctrine was an announcement by President Truman that  "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure."  This came about because of Communist pressure on Greece and Turkey and resulted in aid to these countries.  This was followed by the Marshall Plan to build up the economies of Western Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO), to provide military strength to defend Western Europe against a Soviet invasion. Beside this  economic, political and military assistance, the policies that were in existence for most of World War III were containment and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).  What ultimately brought victory in WWIII, besides factors internal to the Soviet Union was a movement beyond containment and MAD. This was  the Reagan administration policies of rebuilding military strength, putting Pershing missiles in Europe and the Strategic Defense Initiative, disparagingly known at the time as “Star Wars.”  Reagan’s policy, was rollback of the Soviet Union and its satellites, not mere containment.  This policy came to fruition during the George H.W. Bush administration with the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-1.

       What has become  known as the Bush Doctrine was elaborated by President George W. Bush in a series of speeches, starting with his address to the Nation on September 20, 2001, a mere nine days after the September 11 attack by Militant Islamists on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and include three additional speeches in January and June of 2002.  The enemy has been found  to be a world wide network of terrorists that have been  attacking United States interests throughout the world starting with the storming and occupying of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in February 1979 and culminating in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and a planned attack on the White House or Capitol thwarted by brave passengers on an airliner that was forced to crash in Western Pennsylvania. The enemy was and clearly is Islamism, although for eminently practical and political reasons it is very difficult for the U.S. government to acknowledge fully the religious nature of our enemy.

         The Bush Doctrine states that we will pursue these world wide terrorists (read Islamist terrorists) where ever they are and kill or capture them. In addition since these terrorists are not identified with a Nation State we will hold equally responsible with the terrorists themselves any National State that protects, aids or grants sanctuary to the terrorists. In what can be considered a corollary to the Bush Doctrine, in a speech at the West Point graduation in 2002, the President made the following remarks :  “We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long. Homeland defense and missile defense are part of stronger security, and they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.”  This is the doctrine of preemption as contrasted with containment.

         As will be discussed at length below the United States interests abroad had suffered many attacks by Islamist militants prior to the September 11, 2001  attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  War was not declared on these Islamist terrorists until the enunciation of the Bush Doctrine, as discussed above.  However, in 1998 the World Islamic Front (Al Qaeda ) declared war on the United States in the following statement.

Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders:  World Islamic Front Statement: 23 February 1998

     Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin
     Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt
     Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group
     Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan
     Fazlul Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh

     Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But  when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.
     The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current  events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.
     No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
           First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of  places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight  the neighboring Muslim peoples.
          If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression  against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against  their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
          Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
          So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
          Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve  the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and  Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and  the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
 All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the
ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."
    On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
     The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every  Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it [EMPHASIS ADDED], in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of  Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
 This is in addition to the words of Almighty God: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those  who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us  from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"
 We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with  God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on  Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson. \
 Almighty God said: "O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a
 man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."
 Almighty God also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty,  and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."
 Almighty God also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."

1919.  An appropriate place to start is the Versailles Treaty that brought to an end the four year carnage of World War I. Although the Germans won the war against the Russians in the East compelling the Russians to cede vast tracts of land, little more than a year later Germany surrendered in the West after the United States entered the war. They surrendered in part on the basis of the Fourteen Points enunciated by Woodrow Wilson in spite of the fact that no Western  troops had penetrated German soil. The Versailles Treaty imposed a harsh peace on Germany including heavy reparations , blaming them entirely for the war in violation of the spirit of the Fourteen Points: For example;
 Article I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
Article III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
Article V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
 In addition the following statement was in the Wilson 14 Points document:
  "We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to associate herself with us and the other peace- loving nations of the world in covenants of justice and law and fair dealing. We wish her only to accept a place of equality among the peoples of the world, -- the new world in which we now live, -- instead of a place of mastery."
 The Austrian-Hungarian Dynasty was broken up into Austria, Hungary and new countries were established including Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Historic German lands in East Prussia
were stripped from Germany displacing millions of Germans. Germany lost 13.5% of her land and 12.5 % of her population.

1922   Benito Mussolini appointed Premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III.
1925    Mussolini assumes dictatorial powers.
1931    Japan invades Manchuria; sets up puppet state of Manchukuo.
1932   Franklin D. Roosevelt elected President of the United States
1933   Adolph Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg  in January. In March the Nazi party received 44% of the votes in the parliamentary elections.  This was the last election held in Germany until after World War II.
1934   After Hindenburg died, Hitler became President and Chancellor by “consensus”, then assumed the title of Fuhrer.
1935   First of four Neutrality Acts passed by United States Congress and signed into law by Presi
dent Roosevelt.  The last of the four was signed by Roosevelt in 1939 and repealed on November 17, 1941, shortly before the Pearl Harbor Attack.
1935  Italy invades Ethiopia.
1936  Germany remilitarizes the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty
1937.  Japan brutally invades southern China including Shanghai and Nanking. Japanese aircraft attack and sink in the Yangtze the U.S. Gunboat Panay and two Standard Oil tankers with loss of life.
1938.  German troops move into Austria and the Anschluss of the two Germanic countries is proclaimed.  At Munich, the British and the French allow Germany to occupy the Sudetenland, an ethnically German region of Czechoslovakia. One month later Germany invades and occupies the remainder of Czechoslovakia.
1939  Russia and Germany form a Non-Aggression Pact.  Shortly thereafter Germany and Russia attack and divide up Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany.  Russia invades Finland.  Germany and Italy form an alliance, the so-called Pact of Steel.  President Roosevelt officially proclaims United States neutrality.
1940  Germany invades and occupies Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Rumania . Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain, Italy declares war on Great Britain and France.  Italian army attacks British Somalialand, Greece and Egypt. Russian army takes Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.  Japan occupies French Indochina.
The United States declared a national emergency and instituted the first peacetime draft in its history.  Japan joins with Germany and Italy with the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis powers.
1941  The Lend-Lease Act passed by Congress and signed by President Roosevelt.  The United States establishes military bases in Iceland and Greenland to protect the North Atlantic sea lanes.
.Convoying of merchant ships by the United States begun In a document known as the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt and Churchill meet at Argentia Bay in Newfoundland and agree to work together to defeat Nazism.  The United States freeze all Japanese assets in the United States and embargoed the sale of oil to Japan.  The Dutch likewise embargo oil from their holdings in the Dutch East Indies. In December, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the Philippine Island, the Dutch East Indies, Malaya and Singapore. The United States declares war on Japan.  Germany and Italy declare war on the United States and the United States declares war on Germany and Italy.  Heavy air bombardment of Germany starts.  The Panama Canal is closed to Japanese shipping and Japanese assets are seized in the United States.  A stringent embargo is placed by the United States on shipments to Japan of oil, iron steel and other metal products.
1942.  United States forces  recapture Guadalcanal. U.S. Navy sinks four Japanese carriers and defeats Japan in the Battle of Midway. The United States Army invades North Africa. German army occupied Italy.  Japan invades remainder of China and Burma. American forces attack New Guinea.
1943   With the British army moving west from El Alamein and the U.S. army moving east the German Army in North Africa surrenders. Sicily also is occupied by the allies and Italy invaded. Italian government falls and peace talks began.  Germany is defeated with heavy losses by the Russian Army in the Battle of Stalingrad.  American forces attack Bougainville in the Solomon Islands.  U.S. Army lands on Makin Island and Marines lands on Tarara Atoll in the Gilbert Islands
1944   Rome is captured.  France is invaded by allied forces on D-Day, June 6 at the Normandy beaches .  Paris and all of France are  liberated.  Alllied armies move into Germany.  German army is defeated in the bloody Battle of the Budge in the Ardennes.  U.S. forces attack and occupy Saipan in the Marianas, and recapture Guam.. Japanese navy and air forces are defeated by the U.S. navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Philippine Islands are invaded by American forces.  Heavy air bombardment of the Japanese home islands starts.
1945  Germany surrenders unconditionally on May 7. American forces capture Iwo Jima and Okinawa in very bloody fighting. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrenders unconditionally on August 14.  On September 2, the formal surrender of Japan takes place on the Battleship Missouri in Tokyo bay ending World War II.

         We have defined World War IV as the war between Militant Islam( Islamism) and the former Christian West, now  best  represented as the Western democracies. Islamism declared war on the West, defined by Al Qaeda  as Jews and Crusaders  in 1998 in a statement issued by the World Islamic Front. The United States became fully engaged in this war, albeit not formally declared , with the Bush Doctrine enunciated by President Bush shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Islamic Terrorists.

         An appropriate place to start the WWIV timeline is the Versailles Treaty as was the case for WWII. The religious origin and historical context for WWIV also needs to be acknowledged.  Islam is a militaristic expansionist religion as based on the Quran, the Sunnah or Islamic traditions, the hadiths or sayings of Muhammed and indeed the very life of Muhammed.

         According to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary on the internet, Islamism is the “faith, doctrine or cause of Islam.”  The cause of Islam has been described no better than by Martin Kramer in his book Arab Awakening and Islamic Revivalas follows:
 “The idea is simple: Islam must have power in this world. It is the true religion-the religion of God-and its truth is manifest in its power. When Muslims believed, they were powerful. Their power has been lost in modem times because Islam has been abandoned by many Muslims, who have reverted to the condition that preceded God's revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. But if Muslims now return to the original Islam, they can preserve and even restore their power.   That return, to be effective, must be comprehensive; Islam provides the one and only solution to all questions in this world, from public policy to private conduct. It is not merely a religion, in the Western sense of a system of belief in God. It possesses an immutable law, revealed by God, that deals with every aspect of life, and it is an ideology, a complete system of belief about the organization of the state and the world.  This law and ideology can only be implemented through the establishment of a truly Islamic state, under the sovereignty of God. The empowerment of Islam, which is God's plan for mankind, is a sacred end.  It may be pursued by any means that can be rationalized in terms of Islam's own code. At various times, these have included persuasion,  guile, and force.   What is remarkable about Islamic fundamentalism is not its diversity. It is the fact that this idea of power for Islam appeals so effectively across such a wide range of humanity, creating a world of thought that crosses all frontiers. Fundamentalists everywhere must act in narrow circumstances of time and place. But they are who they are precisely because their idea exists above all circumstances. Over nearly a century, this idea has evolved into a coherent ideology, which demonstrates a striking consistency in content and form across a wide expanse of the Muslim world.”

         This is, in Kramer’s view what Islamism, or Islamic fundamentalism is all about.  Bassam Tibi, in his book “The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and World Disorder” describes Islamic fundamentalism in a similar manner.  Islamic fundamentalism, as a form of religious fundamentalism has been considered by some, mistakenly, to be analogous to Protestant fundamentalism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Protestant, or Evangelical fundamentalism is mostly a 20th century movement with its roots stretching back into the 19th century.  It emphasizes a literal interpretation of the Bible and the inerrancy of scripture.  It seeks a return to the peaceful teaching of Jesus and his apostles. Islamic fundamentalism also seeks a return, in its case to the inerrant teachings of Muhammed as found in the Quran  and the Hadith, or the sayings of Mohammed.  The differences between these two fundamentalism are immense.  Evangelical fundamentalism seeks a return to Christ’s teaching by preaching the gospel, i.e. the Good News, and the conversion of people to Christianity by persuasion, as in the time of Paul and the other writers of the New Testament.

         In contrast, Islamic fundamentalism, as we have just described, and as derived specifically from Muhammed, in the Quran and in the hadiths calls for jihad or holy war and subversion  to move toward  an Islamic world order.  The Islamic concept of jihad , or holy war is described as documented in and derived from the Quran by Ibn Warraq in his book Why I am not a Muslim as follows:

 “The totalitarian nature of Islam is nowhere more apparent than in the concept of jihad, the holy war, whose ultimate aim is to conquer the entire world and submit it to the one true faith, to the law of Allah. To Islam alone has been granted the truth: there is no possibility of salvation outside it. It is the sacred duty-an incumbent religious duty established in the Koran and the traditions of all Muslims to bring Islam to all humanity. Jihad is a divine institution, enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam. Muslims must strive, fight, and kill in the name of God.
9.5-6: ‘Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them.’
4.76: ‘Those who believe fight in the cause of God.’
8.12: ‘I will instill terror into the hearts of the Infidels, strike off their heads then, and strike off from them every fingertip.’
8.39-42: ‘Say to the Infidels: If they desist from their unbelief, what is now past shall be forgiven them; but if they return to it, they have already before them the doom of the ancients! Fight then against them till strife be at an end, 'and the religion be all of it God's.’
2.256: ‘But they who believe, and who fly their country, and fight in the cause of God may hope for God's mercy: and God is Gracious, Merciful. It is a grave sin for a Muslim to shirk the battle against the unbelievers those who do will roast in hell.’
8.15, 16: ‘Believers, when you meet the unbelievers preparing for battle do not turn your backs to them. [Anyone who does] shall incur the wrath of God and hell shall be his home: an evil dwelling indeed.’
9.39: "If you do not fight, He will punish you severely, and put others in your place. Those who die fighting for the only true religion, Islam, will be amply rewarded in the life to come.’
4.74: ‘Let those fight in the cause of God who barter the life of this world for that which is to come; for whoever fights on God's path, whether he is killed or triumphs, We will give him a handsome reward.’

         It is abundantly clear from many of the above verses that the Quran is not talking of metaphorical battles or of moral crusades: it is talking of the battlefield. To read such blood thirsty injunctions in a holy book is shocking. In Islam mankind is divided into two groups, Muslims and non-Muslims. The Muslims are members of the Islamic community, the Umma, who possess territories in the dar al-Islam, the Land of Islam, where the edicts of Islam are fully promulgated.  The non-Muslims are the Harbi, people of the dar al-Harb, the Land of Warfare,
any country belonging to the infidels that has not been subdued by Islam but that, nonetheless, is destined to pass into Islamic jurisdiction, either by conversion or by war (Harb). All acts of war are permitted in the dar al-Harb.

         Jihad is defined in Merriam-Webster as a holy war waged on behalf of Islam ,as a religious duty (emphasis added).  In al-islam, an important and authoritative Islamic web site, Jihad defined as fighting in the cause of Allah is documented in many references in both the Koran and the hadiths under such heading as; excellence of jihad, judgment pertaining to jihad, elements of the battle, the stages of the battle, spoils and treaties and covenants.
 Islam expanded militarily during Muhammed’s life and spectacularly after Muhammed’s death in 632.  All the Christian lands in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans, Spain, Armenia and Georgia were lost to Islam until the Islamic tide was stopped at the very gates of Vienna in 1683.  It is a part of the Sunnah that any land once part of the dar al Islam must remain part of the dar al Islam or in the case of lands lost, as for example Palestine or Spain, must ultimately revert to the World of Islam. This explains the undying hostility of Islam to first Jewish resettlement in the Holy Land and to the very existence of the State of Israel.

After World War I

1919 Again, a necessary place to start, again, is World War I and the Versailles and other treaties that  rearranged the political world order.  The Islamic Ottoman Empire made a fateful decision to join the Axis powers and hence was on the losing side in the war. As a result the victorious Allied powers proceeded to breakup the empire.  Even prior to the end of the war in 1916, the British and  French, in the Sykes-Picot agreement, decided to divide the Arab regions of the Empire into British and French zones of influence. In 1917 the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour issued the now famous Balfour Declaration which promised to the Zionists a Jewish National homeland in Palestine, while respecting the rights of the current Muslim inhabitants.  Meanwhile the British with the help of “Lawrence of Arabia” promised Sharif Hussain of the Hedjaz authority over an as yet not defined Arab Nation. The details are murky.  In any case this led Emir Feisal, representing the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Chaim Weizmann, representing the Zionist Organization, the sign an historic nine part agreement on January 3, 1919.  The agreement included a pledge to honor the Balfour Declaration’s pledge for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and to encourage and promote large scale Jewish immigration into Palestine. Free exercise of religion would also be guaranteed.  An administration of Palestine with a Constitution and which would contain both Jewish and Muslim territories.  Feisal, however, makes this agreement conditional on the establishment of a vast Arab and Islamic nation comprised of Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine under a Caliph, presumably Sharif Hussain of the Hedjaz.  This, of course, was a non-starter.
1920   At the San Remo Conference representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Greece and Belgium meet to decide on the disposition and administration of conquered territories that had comprised the Ottoman Empire.  The basic features of a peace treaty with Turkey are  agreed to.  France is assigned mandates to administer Syria and Lebanon.  Likewise, Britain is assigned mandates to administer Iraq and Palestine. The Palestine Mandate specifically included the intention to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine as promised the Zionists in the Balfour declaration of 1917. These mandates are all confirmed by the newly formed League of Nations in 1922.
1922 Great Britain partitions Palestine with 80%  becoming the Arab state of Trans-Jordan, and the 20%  of Palestine remaining in the Palestine mandate.   Abdullah, son of Sharif Hussein, a Hashemite from the Hejaz in Arabia, is brought in by the British to rule over Trans-Jordan.
1929 A large scale attack by Arabs on Jews in Jerusalem takes  place.
1947 Great Britain withdraws from Palestine.  The United Nations proposes to partition the remaining 20% of Palestine into Jewish and Arab regions.  The Jews accept.   The Arabs in Palestine do not.
1948 Palestine is invaded by armies from five neighboring Arab states.  They are all defeated and the Jewish State of Israel is established.
1964 The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is formed with the goal of establishing Arab and Islamic hegemony over all of Palestine.
1967 Israel defeats  Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War.
1972 Islamist militants capture and eleven Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.
1979 Iranian Islamist followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini seize the American Embassy in Tehran taking 66 Americans hostage. The hostages are not released until the inauguration of President Reagan January 20, 1981
1983 Islamist militants attack the United States Marine Corps barracks in Beirut Lebanon killing 241 Americans. President Reagan withdraws the Marines from Lebanon.
1984 William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut is kidnaped, tortured and killed by Islamist militants. Also in1984 a suicide bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in East Beirut kills 23 people.
1985 Islamist militants in Beirut kidnap Americans Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland.  They are held six years before being released.
1987-1993 The first Intifada, Palestinian uprising against Israel, occurs.  It ends with the Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO.
1990 Iraq invades Kuwait
1991 Iraq is driven out of Kuwait in a ground campaign that lasted less than 100 hours.
1993 In February Islamist militants kill eighteen U.S. Rangers and drag several of the dead Rangers through the streets.  As a result, President Clinton withdraws American troops from Somalia.  Also in 1993 Islamist militants using a truck bomb attack the World Trade Center in New York causing six deaths, over a thousand injuries and considerable structural damage.
1996 Islamist militants bomb the Khobar Towers, a housing complex in Saudi Arabia where USAF personnel lived.  Nineteen deaths and over a thousand injuries result.
1998 Islamist militants bomb the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi Kenya and Dar es Salaam Tanzania resulting in over 300 deaths and 500 injuries. Also in 1998 the World Islamic Front (Al Qaeda) declares war on the United States referring  to the U.S.  in its declaration as Crusaders.
2000 The USS Cole, a guided missile destroyer is attacked by suicide bombers in a small boat while refueling in port in Aden, Yemen.  Seventeen sailors are killed and 37 are injured. Also in 2000 the PLO reject a generous peace agreement from Israel  brokered by outgoing President Clinton.  The second Intifada against Israel by the Palestinians starts.
2001 On September 11 two fuel laden commercial airliners slam into the World Trade Center in New York, a third into the Pentagon in Washington DC and a fourth crashes into a fields in Western Pennsylvania after passengers rise up and overcome the hijackers.  These attacks are made by Al Qaeda Islamist militants and are properly interpreted by President Bush as acts of war.  Over three thousand deaths and seven thousand injuries result.  Damage to the Pentagon is moderate but the twin towers of the World Trade Center are brought to the ground.
2003 In March the United States and Great Britain together with their coalition partners attack Iraq.  Saddam Hussain and his government are defeated on the battlefield in a month.  However an insurgency of Islamist militants and former regime loyalists develops shortly thereafter.
2004 On June 28 sovereignty is granted to and assumed by an Interim Iraqi government led by Ayad Allawi. In October elections were held in Afghanistan.  Eight million men and women voted out of ten million registered.  Hamid Karzai was elected Prime Minister receiving the required 50% of the vote cast.

        World War I was a seminal event in world history and, arguably, the seminal event of the 20th century. Communism, fascism and Naziism all arose in that order in the aftermath of and as a consequence of the war.  The Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires all vanished and many new countries arose. The war lasted from 1914 until 1918 and resulted in ten million lives lost. As a result, indeed as a logical result of the war, pacifism developed strongly in Europe as did isolationism in the United States. These factors when combined with the harsh and unfair terms of peace imposed on Germany set the stage for World War II and it was not long in coming. From 1920 until 1932 three Republican Administrations were committed to disarmament.  The purpose of the Naval Disarmament treaties of 1922 and 1930 was to limit the size and armaments of the Capital ships in the navies of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, France and Italy in the ratio of
5 :5: 3: 1.75: 1.75

        Roosevelt was  an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the Wilson Administration and was present at the Paris Peace Conference after the war.  However like many others he was critical of some of the terms of the resulting Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany.  These criticisms did not include the League of Nations and for this he was a strong supporter.

       When Roosevelt became President of the United States in March, 1933 the United States and the world were in a deep depression. More important to our discussion here World War II had already started. Hitler was already Chancellor of Germany and had, in part,  outlined his agenda in “Mein Kampf” although this unfortunately was not taken seriously.  Japan, under the control of a militarist faction invaded Manchuria in 1931 and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League of Nations, the United States and other world powers did nothing. Henry Simpson, Secretary of State in the Hoover administration favored at least strong diplomatic action. In what became known as the Simpson Doctrine, the United States would not recognize territorial change resulting from military conquest.  However without the support of President Hoover and the British government this doctrine was nothing more than a worthless piece of paper.  So when Roosevelt became President in 1933 isolationism was well established in the United States.  In spite of naming Simpson his Secretary of War, Roosevelt like Hoover before him, took no action against Japan.

        In his first inaugural address delivered March 4, 1933 Roosevelt made no mention of what was happening in either Germany or Japan. In his only short comment related to foreign affairs at all he said this: “I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the Good neighbor-the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and , because he does so-respects the rights of others-the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with the world of neighbors.”

         In May of 1933 Roosevelt sent an appeal to “the world” to support the Geneva Disarmament Conference. In his words: “The ultimate objective of this conference must be the complete elimination of all offensive weapons. The immediate objective is a substantial reduction of these weapons and the elimination of many others.”  Roosevelt went on to suggest an additional step concurrent with the stated objectives of the conference: “That all nations of the world should enter into a solemn and definite pact of non-aggression; that they should solemnly reaffirm the obligations they have assumed to limit and reduce their armaments and, provided these obligations are faithfully executed by all signatory powers individually agree that they will send no armed forces whatsoever across their frontiers.”  The Conference collapsed in acrimony and failure in 1934.

         Following the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 President Roosevelt, under the authority of a joint resolution of Congress, issued on February 29, 1936 a Proclamation prohibiting all U.S. citizens and indeed all people living in the territory or jurisdiction of the United States to export arms, ammunition or implements of war to either Italy or Ethiopia, or to any neutral port for transmission to either of the two belligerents. Later in 1936 Roosevelt in an address at Chatauqua
New York reiterated and expanded his “good neighbor” philosophy set forth in his inaugural address, as described above. In this address he firmly associated himself with the isolationist sentiment in the United States by saying “we are not isolationists except in so far as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war.”  The President went on to say ‘I hate war” and “I have passed un-numbered hours and I shall pass un-numbered hours thinking and planning how war may be kept from this nation”   At this point he was as one with the isolationists in the country and in the Congress.

         Roosevelt was reelected overwhelmingly in 1936 carrying all states but two; Maine and Vermont.  This led Democratic party leader Jim Farley to quip “As Maine goes so goes Vermont,” a clever alteration of a political maxim of the day;  As Maine goes so goes the Nation. Amazingly, however, even with this strong mandate     Roosevelt  made absolutely no mention of war, the threat of war, national defense of any other aspect of foreign policy in his 2nd inaugural address delivered on January 20, 1937.     However, as is so often the case, events again were in the saddle. The country and indeed the Congress were deeply isolationist at that time and strongly opposed to getting involved in another European war.  Germany re-militarized the Rhineland in 1936 in contravention of the Versailles treaty and again the other European powers did nothing. Congress reacted in May 1937 with a joint resolution that passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, thus confirming and extending the  Neutrality Act of 1935. This Act signed by President Roosevelt made the policy of the President and the Congress crystal clear in regard to war and especially the coming European war:

 SECTION 1. (a) Whenever the President shall find that there exists a state of war between, or among, two or more foreign states, the President shall proclaim such fact, and it shall thereafter be unlawful to export, or attempt to export, or cause to be exported, arms, ammunition, or implements of war from any place in the United States to any belligerent state named in such proclamation, or to any neutral state for transshipment to, or for the use of, any such belligerent state.
"(b) The President shall, from time to time, by proclamation, extend such embargo upon the export of arms, ammunition, or implements of war to other states as and when they may become involved in such war.
"(c) Whenever the President shall find that a state of civil strife exists in a foreign state and that such civil strife is of a magnitude or is being conducted under such conditions that the export of arms, ammunition, or implements of war from the United foreign state would threaten or endanger the peace of the United States, the President shall proclaim such fact, and it shall thereafter be unlawful to export, or attempt to export, or cause to be exported, arms, ammunition, or implements of war from any place in the United States to such foreign state, or to any neutral state for transshipment to, or for the use of, such foreign state.

        President Roosevelt followed up this action by Congress with his famous Quarantine Speech. in Chicago on October 5, 1937.  In this speech the President  then stated his policy of peace  as follows:  “It is my determination to pursue a policy of peace and to adopt every practicable measure to avoid involvement in war. It ought to be inconceivable that in this modern era, and in the face of experience, any nation could be so foolish and ruthless as to run the risk of plunging the whole world into war by invading and violating, in contravention of solemn treaties, the territory of other nations that have done them no real harm and are too weak to protect themselves adequately. Yet the peace of the world and the welfare and security of every nation are today being threatened by that very thing.”

      Events remained in the saddle and in the fall of 1937 Japan bombed Shanghai and invaded the remainder of China.  The Capitol, Nanking ,was brutally ravaged.  300,000 men, women children were deliberately massacred and women brutally raped by Japanese forces as a matter of policy. As the Japanese forces approached Nanking Chiang Kai-Shek’s Foreign Office advised the U.S. Embassy that it must prepare to evacuate. Many of the staff left immediately on the gunboat the  USS Luzon.  A week later the remainder departed Nanking on the Gunboat USS Panay and Ambassador Joseph Grew so notified the Japanese government. On December 12, 1937 the Panay and several U.S. tankers all flying the U.S. flag were bombed, strafed and sunk by Japanese aircraft with resultant loss of life.  The Japanese government apologized and claimed it was a mistake which it was not. President Roosevelt, anxious to avoid war, accepted the apology and an indemnity.

     The war in Europe heated up in 1938. Germany annexed Austria to much applause in Austria and then, emboldened sought the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  This was a region of the country where predominately ethnic Germans lived. At Munich France and Great Britain capitulated to Hitler’s demand thus, among other things, making  the remainder of Czechoslovakia indefensible.  Hitler wasted no time in occupying the remainder of Czechoslovakia.  Again Britain and France took no action except  belatedly to start to re-arm. On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland shortly after signing a non-Aggression pact with the USSR. Britain and France which had guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland belatedly decided it was time to oppose Hitler. The period after the occupation of Poland by Germany and the USSR and the German attack on Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Lowlands and France in April/May of 1940 became known as the Phony War. In April and May all these countries including France were very quickly defeated and the British Army was driven  off the continent but miraculously rescued at Dunkirk to fight another day.  Japan joined with Germany and Italy via the Tripartite Pact to form the Axis Powers. .  In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR and so now Great Britain and the Soviet Union became allies against the Axis Powers.

     What then was the position of President Roosevelt and United States government during these trying times?  Roosevelt’s policy at this time was to pursue peace through negotiation. The country and the Congress remained deeply isolationist at this time and in addition the powerful  isolationist movement America First led by Charles Lindbergh presented a strong voice opposed to involvement in the European war.

     On September 26, 1938, just three days before Munich in a message addressed to European heads of state President Roosevelt said this:
 “The supreme desire of the American people is to live in peace. But in the event of a general war they face the fact that no nation can escape some measure of the consequences of such a world catastrophe. The traditional policy of the United States has been the furtherance of the settlement of international disputes by pacific means. It is my conviction that all people under the threat of war today pray that peace may be made before, rather than after, war.”, and this “On behalf of the 130 millions of people of the United States of America and for the sake of humanity everywhere I most earnestly appeal to you not to break off negotiations looking to a peaceful, fair, and constructive settlement of the questions at issue. I earnestly repeat that so long as negotiations continue, differences may be reconciled.”

  A day later, also before Munich the President sent the following message to Hitler:
 “The question before the world today, Mr. Chancellor, is not the question of errors of judgment or of injustices committed in the past. It is the question of the fate of the world today and tomorrow. The world asks of us who at this moment are heads of nations the supreme capacity to achieve the destinies of nations without forcing upon them as a price, the mutilation and death of millions of citizens.”
 “The two points I sought to emphasize were, first, that all matters of difference between the German Government and the Czechoslovak Government could and should be settled by pacific methods; and, second, that the threatened alternative of the use of force on a scale likely to result in a general war is as unnecessary as it is unjustifiable. It is, therefore, supremely important that negotiations should continue without interruption until a fair and constructive solution is reached.  My conviction on these two points is deepened because responsible statesmen have officially stated that an agreement in principle has already been reached between the Government of the German Reich and the Government of Czechoslovakia, although the precise time, method and detail of carrying out that agreement remain at issue.”

     At this point, however, while Roosevelt did not give up on the negotiation track, he and the Congress became very aware that the country needed to prepare better for our national defense. The President acknowledged the country’s need to shore up our national defense posture in his annual message to Congress January 4, 1939.  However Roosevelt continued on the peace track with a second telegram to Hitler on August 24, 1939 as follows:

         “I therefore urge with all earnestness-and I am likewise urging the President of the Republic of Poland-that the Governments of Germany and of Poland agree by common accord to refrain from positive act of hostility for a reasonable and stipulated period, that they agree likewise by common accord to solve the controversies which have arisen between them by one of the three following methods: first, by direct negotiation; second, by submission of these controversies to an impartial arbitration in which they can both have confidence; or, third, that they agree to the solution of these controversies through the procedure of conciliation, selecting as conciliator or moderator a national of one of the traditionally neutral states of Europe, or a national of one of the American republics which are all of them free from any connection with or participation in European political affairs.  Both Poland and Germany being sovereign governments, it is understood, of course, that upon resort to any one of the alternatives I suggest, each nation will agree to accord complete respect to the independence and territorial integrity of the other.
         The people of the United States are as one in their opposition to policies of military conquest and domination. They are as one in rejecting the thesis that any ruler, or any people, possess the right achieve their ends or objectives through the taking of action which will plunge countless millions of people into war and which will bring distress and suffering to every nation of the world, belligerent and neutral, when such ends and objectives, so far as they are just and reasonable, can be satisfied through processes of peaceful negotiation or by resort to judicial arbitration.   I appeal to you in the name of the people of the United States, and I believe in the name of peace-loving men and women everywhere, to agree to the solution of the controversies existing between your Government and that of Poland through the adoption of one of the alternative methods I have proposed. I need hardly reiterate that should the Governments of Germany and of Poland be willing to solve their differences in the peaceful manner suggested, the Government of the United States still stands prepared to contribute its share to the solution of the problems which are endangering world peace in the form set forth in my message of April 14.”

         On September 3, 1939, after the German invasion of Poland and the Hitler-Stalin pact President Roosevelt addressed the American people in a radio address from the White House and made these comments:  “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience. I have said not once but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.  I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And I give you assurance(s) and reassurance that every effort of your Government will be directed toward that end. As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States”.

          Congress also remained resolutely neutral.  In an address to a joint session of Congress on September 21, 1939 Roosevelt advocated a change in the Neutrality Act of 1937 as follows:
     “At the outset I proceed on the assumption that every member of the Senate and of the House of Representatives, and every member of the Executive Branch of the Government, including the President and his associates, personally and officially, are equally and without reservation in favor of such measures as will protect the neutrality, the safety and the integrity of our country and at the same time keep us out of war. Because I am wholly willing to ascribe an honorable desire for peace to those who hold different views from my own as to what those measures should be, I trust that these gentlemen will be sufficiently generous to ascribe equally lofty purposes to those with whom they disagree. Let no man or group in any walk of life assume exclusive protectorate over the future well-being of America, because I conceive that regardless of party or section the mantle of peace and of patriotism is wide enough to cover us all. Let no group assume the exclusive label of the ‘peace bloc’ We all belong to it”.
     “On July fourteenth of this year I asked the Congress in the cause of peace and in the interest of real American neutrality and to take action to change that act.  I now ask again that such action be taken in respect to of the act which is wholly inconsistent with ancient precepts of the law of nations-the embargo provisions. I ask it because they are, in my opinion, most vitally dangerous to American neutrality, American security, and American peace. I seek a greater consistency through the repeal of the embargo provisions and a return to international law. I seek re-enactment of the historic and traditional American policy which, except for the disastrous interlude of the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts, has served us well for nearly a century and a half.  It has been erroneously said that return to that policy might bring us nearer to war. I give to you my deep and unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today I say this because with the repeal of the embargo this Government clearly and definitely will insist that American citizens and American ships keep away from the immediate perils of the actual zones of conflict.  Repeal of the embargo and a return to international law are the crux of this issue."   On November 4, 1939 Congress by joint resolution passed the 1939 Neutrality Act.

         Even at this time well after Munich and the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union Roosevelt still had an appetite for negotiation with Hitler and Mussolini, and, in his own words considered himself to be a member of the peace bloc. In February and March of 1940 he sent his Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles on a quixotic mission to negotiate directly with Hitler and Mussolini.  Of course nothing came of this initiative and it had been suggested by some that this was part of his re-election strategy. On the other hand he may have been responding to the public’s, and his own desire to seek peace and avoid war.  A public opinion poll  revealed that 58% of the public supported a peace conference with Germany at that time.
 In April 1940 Denmark and Norway fell and on May 10th Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France were invaded by German troops.  By May 13th the Germans had broken through the lightly defended Ardennes Forest and France’s fate was sealed. On May 16, President Roosevelt addressed Congress and asked for an appropriation of $900,000,000 and an additional $300,000,000 contract authorization for the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.
  At this point it is clear that Roosevelt, although still talking  peace realizes that we must seriously rearm and prepare for war if it comes.  On May 26, President addresses the American people by radio from the White House.  In this speech the President outlines the steps his administration has taken to prepare for war .This is really the first time that the President has advised the American people on the need for a stronger defense posture.  His message is we pray for peace but we must prepare for war.:
 MY FRIENDS:
     “There are many among us who closed their eyes, from lack of interest or lack of knowledge; honestly and sincerely thinking that the many hundreds of miles of salt water made the American Hemisphere so remote that the people of North and Central and South America could go on living in the midst of their vast resources without reference to, or danger from, other Continents of the world.
     There are some among us who were persuaded by minority groups that we could maintain our physical safety by retiring within our continental boundaries -- the Atlantic on the east, the Pacific on the west, Canada on the north and Mexico on the south. I illustrated the futility -- the impossibility -- of that idea in my Message to the Congress last week. Obviously, a defense policy based on that is merely to invite future attack.
     And, finally, there are a few among us who have deliberately and consciously closed their eyes because they were determined to be opposed to their government, its foreign policy and every other policy, to be partisan, and to believe that anything that the Government did was wholly wrong.
 To those who have closed their eyes for any of these many reasons, to those who would not admit the possibility of the approaching storm -- to all of them the past two weeks have meant the shattering of many illusions.   They have lost the illusion that we are remote and isolated and, therefore, secure against the dangers from which no other land is free.  In some quarters, with this rude awakening has come fear, fear bordering on panic. It is said that we are defenseless. It is whispered by some that, only by abandoning our freedom, our ideals, our way of life, can we build our defenses adequately, can we match the strength of the aggressors.       I did not share those illusions. I do not share these fears.”

         In this speech the President made clear to the American public that the country was in a national emergency and to avoid war, which was still his goal, we must prepare for war.  He defended his Administration against charges that the country was ill-prepared for war. He also criticized strongly those who had closed their eyes to the gathering storm.  In 1940 for the first time in the country’s  history a peacetime draft was enacted with the Selective Service Training and Service Act of 1940.   This act provided for a limit of 900,000 men to be in training at one time and limited military service to one year. After Pearl Harbor compulsory service was extended to the duration of the war plus six months.  Also in 1940 a state national emergency was declared that , among other things prevented anyone from leaving the armed forces.  However, in May of 1940 President Roosevelt signed an Executive Order that allowed men to resign temporarily with the right of return in order to undertake an undercover mission.  The undercover mission was the formation of the American Volunteer Group, soon to be known as  Flying Tigers under the command of Claire Chenault to help the Chinese fight the Japanese in China. The Flying Tigers didn’t enter the war in China until December 20, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  They were de-activated July 4, 1942.  In those seven months they destroyed 297 Japanese aircraft while losing only eleven of their own.
 In the 1940 campaign for re-election for an historic third term in the White House stood firmly for peace and for keeping the country out of war with the campaign slogan Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream. In Boston on October 30 he said this “ I have said this before but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars”   In Brooklyn on November 1 he said “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars;  and I will keep on fighting” And on November 3 in Cleveland he said “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.”
 However, long before the election Roosevelt and Churchill had initiated a secret correspondence while Churchill  was First Lord of the Admiralty and not yet Prime Minister.  The correspondence was kept secret from the Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister and the United State Congress. In this correspondence the President made clear his determination to support Great Britain in the war against Germany while continuing to talk peace to the American public. An early fruit of this correspondence was the September 1940 exchange of American destroyers needed by Great Britain for the war in the Atlantic for American bases in the Carribean and Newfoundland. This was a clear violation of the spirit of if not the exact wording of the Neutrality laws.
         President Roosevelt was re-elected to a third term.  Shortly thereafter on December 17 he outlined the elements of what would become the Lend-Lease program in a press conference. Lend-Lease was conceived by the President as a way to provide assistance to Great Britain, and later Russia, without giving the aid to them outright or without the recipient countries incurring any war debt.

         The Lend-Lease Act was passed by Congress March 11, 1941 but not without considerable opposition. Congress was committed to neutrality and was opposed to anything that could entangle us in another European war. The margin of victory was 260-165 in the House of Representatives and 60-30 in the Senate, but only after Congress added the following provisions to the act:
Sec3(5)
d) Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or to permit the authorization of convoying vessels by naval vessels of the United States.

(e) Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize or to permit the authorization of the entry of any American vessel into a combat area in violation of section 3 of the neutrality Act of 1939.

Sec 10
Nothing in this Act shall be construed to change existing law relating to the use of the land and naval forces of the United States, except insofar as such use relates to the manufacture, procurement, and repair of defense articles, the communication of information and other noncombatant purposes enumerated in this Act.

         Roosevelt  elaborated on the Lend-Lease concept  in a Fireside Chat to the Nation on December 29 in what became known as his Arsenal of Democracy speech:
         “This is not a fireside chat on war. It is a talk on national security, because the nub of the whole purpose of your President is to keep you now, and your children later, and your grandchildren much later, out of a last-ditch war for the preservation of American independence and all of the things that American independence means to you and to me and to ours.”
         The people of Europe who are defending themselves do not ask us to do their fighting. They ask us for the implements of war, the planes, the tanks, the guns, the freighters which will enable them to fight for their liberty and for our security. Emphatically we must get these weapons to them, get them to them in sufficient volume and quickly enough, so that we and our children will be saved the agony and suffering of war which others have had to endure.”
         “I believe that the Axis powers are not going to win this war. I base that belief on the latest and best of information.  We have no excuse for defeatism. We have every good reason for hope -- hope for peace, yes, and hope for the defense of our civilization and for the building of a better civilization in the future.
         I have the profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to increase our production of all the implements of defense, to meet the threat to our democratic faith.”

         This was a dramatic change in mood as shown by the above comments and also the following comments by the President:
 “For, on September 27th, 1940, this year, by an agreement signed in Berlin, three powerful nations, two in Europe and one in Asia, joined themselves together in the threat that if the United States of America interfered with or blocked the expansion program of these three nations -- a program aimed at world control -- they would unite in ultimate action against the United States.
 The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.
 It was only three weeks ago their leader stated this: " There are two worlds that stand opposed to each other." And then in defiant reply to his opponents, he said this: "Others are correct when they say: With this world we cannot ever reconcile ourselves .... I can beat any other power in the world." So said the leader of the Nazis.  In other words, the Axis not merely admits but the Axis proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.
 In view of the nature of this undeniable threat, it can be asserted, properly and categorically, that the United States has no right or reason to encourage talk of peace, until the day shall come when there is a clear intention on the part of the aggressor nations to abandon all thought of dominating or conquering the world.”  “ We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as we would show were we at war.”   Clearly reality had finally reached the White House.

         On January 6, 1941 President Roosevelt delivered a speech before Congress that is known to us as the Four Freedoms speech. This was another speech on national defense, preparation for war and help for Great Britain under attack by Germany.  It was not a call for war and did not even intimate a possibility that the United States would enter the war. Toward the end of the speech the President said that the following four freedoms should be freedoms for all people in the world in the future: Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want.  He said that this was not a vision for a distant millennium. Rather it was attainable in our own time and generation.

         On January 20, 1941 Roosevelt was inaugurated for a third term.  In his third inaugural address the President, rather unbelievably made no mention of the European war, events heating up in the Pacific and in China except for the vague statement “ In this day the task of the people is to save the Nation and its institutions from disruption from without.”

         In spite of the clear intention of the Neutrality laws and the specific provisions Congress had added to the Lend-Lease Act, President Roosevelt authorized the inauguration of “naval patrols” in the North Atlantic in proximity to British convoys with the provision to notify British warships about the presence of German submarines. The position of the United States government was that this was not convoying ships carrying contraband to Great Britain. Convoying of course had been specifically prohibited in the Lend Lease Act.   This did not fool Germany but Germany was  reluctant to provoke the United States  into war and so our naval vessels were not attacked at least not initially. The United States also built military bases in Greenland and Iceland.

         A secret conference was held in Argentia Bay, Newfoundland between President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a few aides. The proceedings of the conference became known as the Atlantic Charter:

 President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill , representing His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom, being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world.
First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;
Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;
Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;
Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;
Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;
Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.
Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;
Eighth, they believe that all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force.   Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential.  They will likewise aid and encourage all other practical measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

         This was a personal agreement  between two heads of state that was not submitted to either the Senate of the United States or Parliament in Great Britain. It may not have been a treaty but it committed the United States, on the sole word of the President, to the complete destruction of Nazi Germany while remaining officially neutral.  At the Conference an ultimatum to Japan was considered as was the possible occupation of the Portugese Cape Verde Islands by U.S. troops.

        In response to submarine attacks on several destroyers in the North Atlantic and the sinking of the Robin Moore, a U.S. merchant ship in the South Atlantic, and the sinking also in the South Atlantic of another U.S. owned ship although under a Romanian flag, on September 11 President Roosevelt upped the ante with Germany in a radio address on Maintaining the Freedom of the Seas.  In this address the President described German submarines and surface raiders as the “rattle snakes of the Atlantic” and when on to say “ when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.”  He gave American vessels the right to attack and shoot on sight German or Italian warships in any waters deemed by him to be necessary for our defense.  This included the entire North and South Atlantic Oceans.  In response to an October request by  the President, Congress on November 17 repealed sections 2, 3, and 6 of the Neutrality Act of 1939, thereby permitting United States vessels to be armed and to carry cargoes to belligerent ports anywhere.
 In a Navy Day address on October 27, 1941 President made the following extraordinary claims concerning Hitler’s plans:
        "For example, I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany by Hitler's government-by the planners of the new world order. It is a map of South America and a part of Central America, as Hitler proposes to reorganize it. Today in this area there are fourteen separate countries. The geographical experts of Berlin, however, have ruthlessly obliterated all existing boundary lines; and have divided South America into five vassal states, bringing the whole continent under their domination. And they have also so arranged it that the territory of one of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama and our great life line-the Panama Canal.  That is his plan. It will never go into effect.”
 “This map makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States itself.  Your government has in its possession another document made in Germany by Hitler's government. It is a detailed plan, which, for obvious reasons, the Nazis did not wish and do not wish to publicize just yet, but which they are ready to impose-a little later-on a dominated world-if Hitler wins. It is a plan to abolish all existing religions-Protestant, Catholic, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.”
 “In the place of the churches of our civilization, there is to be set up an International Nazi Church-a church which will be served by orators sent out by the Nazi Government. In the place of the Bible, the words of Mein Kampf  will be imposed and enforced as Holy Writ. And in place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols-the swastika and the naked sword.”   These claims are now known to have been based on forgeries designed to bring the United States into war with Germany.

         In 1941 the situation in the Pacific with the Japanese was also heating up. The Japanese in the 1930's contemplated  the presence of the Western colonial powers in Asia and came to the conclusion that Asia belonged to the Asians,  specifically with the Japanese in the preponderant role. They promulgated the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in order to make this come to pass.  This also is why they invaded Manchuria and China.  The United States looked with alarm at these developments and in September 1940 placed restrictions on the sale of oil and other essential supplies to Japan.
         In July 1941 the Vichy government of France acquiesced in Japan’s demand for military control of Indo-China and shortly thereafter the Japanese invaded and occupied these French colonial possessions. The United States government reacted by freezing Japanese and Chinese assets and placed a total embargo on the export of oil, iron and metal products to Japan. The Dutch also placed an embargo on the export of oil to Japan from their holdings in the Dutch East Indies. The resulting situation was intolerable for Japan and it was obvious something had to change.  Japan  either had to withdraw from China and Indo-China or go to war against the United States to protect what it saw as its vital interests. As a result the year 1941 was a year of intense negotiation between Japan and the United States. On May 12th of that fateful year the Japanese Ambassador Nomura handed a draft proposal to resolve the crisis to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: Among other things the proposal outlined, in part,  for discussion the following:
 The Government of the United States, acknowledging the three principles as enunciated in the Konoe Statement and the principles set forth on the basis of the said three principles in the treaty with the Nanking Government as well as in the Joint Declaration of Japan, Manchukuo and China and relying upon the policy of the Japanese Government to establish a relationship of neighborly friendship with China, shall forthwith request the Chiang Kai-shek regime to negotiate peace with Japan.
 When official approbation to the present Understanding has been given by both Governments, the United States and Japan shall assure each other to mutually supply such commodities as are, respectively, available or required by either of them. Both Governments further consent to take necessary steps to the resumption. of normal trade relations as formerly established under the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan.   Having in view that the Japanese expansion in the direction of the Southwestern Pacific area is declared to be of peaceful nature, American cooperation shall be given in the production and procurement of natural resources (such as oil, rubber, tin, nickel) which Japan needs.
 The Governments of the United States and Japan jointly guarantee the independence of the Philippine Islands on the condition that the Philippine Islands shall maintain a status of permanent neutrality. The Japanese subjects shall not be subject to any discriminatory treatment.
 Japanese immigration to the United States shall receive amicable consideration--on a basis of equality with other nationals and freedom from discrimination.

        On June 21 the State Department responded in part as follows: " The Japanese Government having communicated to the Government of the United States the general terms within the framework of which the Japanese Government will propose the negotiation of a peaceful, settlement with the Chinese Government., which terms are declared by the Japanese Government to be in harmony with the Konoe principles regarding neighborly friendship and mutual respect of sovereignty and territories and with the practical application of those principles, the President of the United States will suggest to the Government of China that the Government of China and the Government of Japan enter into a negotiation on a basis mutually advantageous and acceptable for a termination of hostilities and resumption of peaceful relations.
  When official approbation to the present understanding has been given by both Governments, the United States and Japan shall assure each other mutually to supply such commodities as are, respectively, available and required by either of them. Both Governments further consent to take necessary steps to resume normal trade relations as formerly established under the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between the United States and Japan. If a new commercial treaty is desired by both Governments, it would be negotiated as soon as possible and be concluded in accordance with usual procedures.
  The Government of Japan declares its willingness to enter at such time as the Government of the United States may desire into negotiation with the Government of the United States with a view to the conclusion of a treaty for the neutralization of the Philippine Islands, when Philippine independence shall have been achieved."

 On August 6, Nomura made a follow-up proposal the Secretary of State Hull:
  I. The Japanese Government undertakes:--
 (A) that, in order to remove such causes as might constitute a menace of a military character to the United States,, it will not further station its troops in the Southwestern Pacific areas except French Indo-China and that the Japanese troops now stationed in French Indo-China will be withdrawn forthwith on the settlement of the China Incident, and
 (B) that, in order to remove such causes as might constitute a menace of political and military character to the Philippine Islands, the Japanese Government will guarantee the neutrality of the islands at an opportune time on the condition that Japan and the Japanese subjects will not be placed in any discriminatory positions as compared with other countries and their nationals including the United States and its nationals, and
 (C) that, in order to remove such causes as might be responsible for the instability of the economic relations between Japan and the United States,65 the Japanese Government will cooperate with the Government of the United States in the production and procurement of such natural resources as are required by the United States.
  II. The Government of the United States undertakes:--
 (A) that, in order to remove such causes as might constitute a direct menace of military character to Japan or to her international communications, the Government of the United States will suspend its military measures in the Southwestern Pacific areas, and also that, upon a successful conclusion of the present conversations, it will advise the Governments of Great Britain and of the Netherlands to take similar steps, and
 (B) that, in order to remove such causes as might be responsible for military, political and economic friction between Japan and the United States, the Government of the United States will cooperate with the Japanese Government in the production and procurement of natural resources as are required by Japan in the Southwestern Pacific areas, especially in the Netherlands East Indies, and
 (C) that, in conjunction with the measures as set forth in (B) above, the Government of the United States will take steps necessary for restoring the normal relations of trade and commerce which have hitherto existed between Japan and the United States, and
 D) that, in view of the undertaking by the Japanese Government as set forth in I. (A) above, the Government of the United States will use its good offices for the initiation of direct negotiations between the Japanese Government and the Chiang Kai-shek regime for the purpose of a speedy settlement of the China Incident, and that the Government of the United States will recognize a special status of Japan in French Indo-China even after the withdrawal of Japanese troops from that area.

  Secretary of State Hull’s response, in part,  to Nomura on August 8 was as follows:
  The President's proposal was that, if the Japanese Government would refrain from occupying Indochina or establishing bases there with its military and naval forces, or, in case such steps had already actually been begun, would withdraw such forces, the President would do everything