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Everything old is new again.



http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007663

None Dare Call It Conspiracy
We've been hearing variations on "BUSH LIED!!!!" for at least 60
years.

BY MORTON KELLER
Sunday, December 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Excerpts........

"Variations of "Bush lied" have been part of the political scene ever
since America plunged into its permanent overseas embroilment in the
Second World War. Reviewing that record won't settle the current
dispute over how and why we got into Iraq. But it should remind us
that George W. Bush's accusers are hardly walking in fresh snow.

The charge that FDR knew of the Japanese intention to attack Pearl
Harbor, but used it to ensure American entry into the war against the
Axis, surfaced after 1945, when the war was over, FDR was dead, and
the decks were cleared for some sleeves-rolled-up recrimination. In
1948 the progressive historian (and prewar isolationist) Charles A.
Beard accused FDR of "maneuvering the country into war." Anti-New Deal
Republicans such as Robert A. Taft, anxious for a stick with which to
whack at FDR, thought FDR's "policy of bluff" drove Japan to its Pearl
Harbor attack. The accusation never really took hold, but never wholly
faded away. Eccentric historian John Toland (who found much good in
Hitler) resurrected the FDR conspiracy story in his book "Infamy"
(1982), which unfortunately appeared a year after Gordon Prange's "At
Dawn We Slept" definitively buried it. "..........................



"History's lesson is this: in modern America, the path to war is beset
with actions that rest on uncertain or arguable justification. The
political/ideological fringes will craft theories of conspiracy with
scant regard for fact or probability. And the opposition will make
what it can of this material, within the limits of political
prudence."