If you have to ask, you know the answer.

"[W]hose side is Obama on?" asks Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club.

This man is what is known as an "Idiot."

'Islam is reviving British values', says former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Everything you know about the US and Muhammad Mossadegh is wrong

When discussing the evil of the Iranian mullahs and their malevolent plans for nuclear weapons, I inevitably have a few, mainly leftists and Ronulans, who argue, "Well, we would not have this problem if the US had just left Iran alone and not overthrown Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953." They use that argument as an excuse for allowing the mullahs to have nuclear weapons, almost as if when the mullahs nuke New York City these people will argue, "We can't retaliate. We can't fight Iran. We have no right to, because we overthrew Muhammad Mossaegh in 1953." (And don't think Ron Paul in particular would not argue that.)

Now, we have a serious challenge to the established narrative:

Ray Takeyh of the Council of Foreign Affairs, an Iranian-American and a liberal, has powerfully attacked the conventional view of U.S. responsibility for the overthrow of Mosaddeq. Takeyh attacks it most recently in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs. Previously, he had made his case in the Weekly Standard.
Takeyh argues that Mosaddeq was destined to fall due to the internal opposition produced by the British response to his oil nationalization policy, and that the U.S. played an inconsequential role in his demise. He makes the following points:

1. Mosaddeq, a popularly elected leader, antagonized the British by taking over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose majority shareholder was the British government.
2. Great Britain responded by, among other measures, discouraging European countries from buying Iran’s oil and interdicting Iranian ships that carried oil for export.
3. The U.S., under President Truman, tried to mediate the dispute and work out a compromise.
4. Mosaddeq wasn’t interested in compromising.
5. Britain’s retaliatory measures dealt a huge blow to the Iranian oil industry, and to Iran’s economy generally.
6. As a result, Mosaddeq became unpopular in Iran.
7. Among those who turned against him were the mullahs — the predecessors of those who excoriate the U.S. for alleging toppling Mosaddeq and restoring the Shah.
8. The Shah, fed up with Mosaddeq, announced he was leaving the country due to unspecified medical concerns.
9. Mass demonstrations broke out imploring the Shah to stay. (There is, according to Takeyh, no evidence that the CIA was behind these demonstrations).
10. Mosaddeq responded by dissolving the Iranian legislature and holding a national referendum on this action.
11. The election was rigged, as evidenced by the fact that 99 percent of vote went Mosaddeq’s way.
12. The U.S. government, now led by President Eisenhower, urged Mosaddeq to settle his dispute with Great Britian, but also began considering a British plan to further undermine Mosaddeq.
13. The CIA participated with Britain’s M16 in this plan which included paying journalists to write stories critical of the prime minister, charging that he was corrupt and power hungry, and alleging that he was of Jewish descent.
14. With U.S. encouragement, the Shah signed a royal decree dismissing Mosaddeq and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as the new prime minister.
15. The Shah sent an emissary to deliver the decree to Mosaddeq, who refused to accept it and promptly arrested the emissary.
16. The Eisenhower administration did not pursue the matter further. Indications are that it was prepared to change direction and “snuggle up” to Mosaddeq (in the words of Bedell Smith, a high level State Department official and the president’s close confidant).
17. General Zahedi, however, did not give up. He published the Shah’s decree.
18. This led to major demonstrations against Mosaddeq throughout the country.
19. The U.S. did not take these demonstrations seriously. The U.S. ambassador cabled Washington to say they would probably prove insignificant.
20. Mosaddeq commanded the military to restore order, but instead many soldiers joined in the demonstrations.
21. The army chief of staff told Mosaddeq he had lost control of many of his troops and of the capital city.
22. Mosaddeq went into hiding, but later turned himself in.
23. The Shah was restored.

As Power Line's Paul Mirengoff puts it:

If this scenario is accurate, the United States was a bit player in the overthrow of Mosaddeq. The prime minister authored his demise and the Iranians carried it out.
The U.S. did nothing that rose to the level of requiring an apology, much less an apology to brutal theocrats whose predecessors supported the overthrow of Mosaddeq.

I agree,  but I always have in this case. Nevertheless, judge for yourselves. Here are links to Takeyh pieces in the Weekly Standard and in Foreign Affairs. Check 'em out.

ISIS has the Kurds on the ropes

I have often said that the two most important elements of a military operation are information and communications. Obviously, though, you need other things as well, like troops and ammunition. The Kurds, who have been acting as sort of the good guys in the brewing civil war in Iraq, have plenty of the former but are running out of the latter. So, will Obama send them ammunition to stop the manifest evil that is the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria?

Of course not:

President Obama famously failed to act when warned that ISIS was preparing to mount an offensive in Western Iraq. This left ISIS free to conquer, with virtually no resistance, city after city in the defense of which American soldiers have shed blood.
Now Obama is receiving new warnings, this time from the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In fact, according to the Washington Post, the Kurds are “pleading for U.S. military aid.”
Unlike the Iraqi government, the Kurds possess a viable military that is prepared to fight ISIS. Indeed, they are fighting ISIS, and fairly effectively.
However, the Kurds now have a 650 mile border to defend, thanks to the abandonment of the area by Iraq’s military forces. Thus, the Kurdish forces are stretched extremely thin.
The Kurds should be receiving a share of the weapons the U.S. is supplying to the Iraqi government. But that, of course, isn’t happening. Mansour Barzani, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s intelligence and security chief, told the Post that Baghdad hasn’t provided “a single bullet.”
Meanwhile, says the Post, the ISIS forces attacking the Kurds have seized weapons worth hundreds of millions of dollars from retreating Iraqi soldiers. In effect, Baghdad is supplying ISIS while providing the Kurds with nothing.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Obama administration has rejected Kurdish pleas for arms with which to fight ISIS. Its rationale is that assistance must come through the central government.
[...]
It’s almost as if Obama is indifferent to the progress of ISIS and willing to embrace any excuse for standing idly by in the face of that progress.

And now it's getting much worse:

[...] ISIS has made its first significant inroads against the defenses of the overstretched Kurds. They have punched through to the northern town of Sinjar. Another town, Wana, has also fallen, leaving ISIS within striking distance of Mosul’s hydroelectric dam, the largest in the country.
In Sinjar, ISIS promptly blew up a Shiite shrine and ordered residents to convert or die.
The Obama administration, through State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, stated that the United States is “gravely concerned” by the displacement of civilians and the loss of life. What’s next, a #SavetheShrines campaign?

This is where the true Obama has come out:

Why hasn’t Obama supplied the Kurds? Apparently, it has something to do with the niceties of Iraq’s constitutional framework. Obama, it seems, has more regard for that framework than he does for ours.
If Obama is prepared to ignore the U.S. Constitution to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants who face virtually zero chance of deportation, he should be willing to overlook Iraqi formalities in order to help the Kurds defend themselves against our most implacable and barbaric enemy — a group that even Eric Holder finds “more frightening than anything.”
But Obama’s mission is the transformation of America, not so much its defense.

And speaking of the 1930s

It's approaching September 1939 in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin accuses Ukraine of invading Russian territory, just as Hitler accused Poland of invading Germany as justification for his invasion of Poland.

And Russia has 15,000 troops on the Ukrainian border.

Welcome to 1939.

Welcome to the 1930s

So says Roger Simon at PJ Media. His reference is to the rising tide of anti-Semitism, especially in Europe, and our inept State Department's surrender to it, but he could easily be referencing Russia in Ukraine, or China in the Far East. His most chilling line: "[W]e are in a new version of the 1930s with the armageddon of the ’40s around the corner."

As Joe Biden once said, "Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it." And so we are.

Japan lays groundwork for collective defense against China

While most of the world has been understandably distracted with the implosion of Iraq and the Soviet ... er, Russian invasion of Ukraine, momentous events have been taking place on the other side of the world: Japan has moved away from its commitment to international pacifism under its post-war constitution:

The Abe administration, in a Cabinet decision made on Tuesday — the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Self-Defense Forces — changed the government’s longstanding interpretation of the Constitution so that Japan can exercise the right to collective self-defense. The decision not only effectively undermines the Constitution’s war-renouncing Article 9 — which has prevented Japan from being involved in international military conflicts in the postwar period — but also violates the principles of rule of law under the Constitution.
The Cabinet decision, pending related changes to relevant laws, paves the way for the SDF to use force overseas to defend Japan’s allies even if Japan itself is not under attack. In other words, it allows Japan to take part in conflicts abroad, potentially putting SDF members in harm’s way.
The Abe administration’s new interpretation of the Constitution also does not rule out Japan’s participation in United Nations-led collective security operations, which are mainly aimed at punishing countries that breach international peace — a concept different from self-defense. This contradicts what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated at a news conference following Tuesday’s Cabinet decision: “Japan will never take part in fighting such as has taken place in the Gulf War or the Iraq War.” Abandoning the traditional “defense-only defense” position, the administration’s move marks a clear departure from the postwar Japan’s basic defense posture.

The Japan Times editorial makes it clear that it opposes this course of action, although most of its criticisms are procedural. Abe has fully earned his reputation as a Japanese nationalist, which is contributing to the heavy criticism he is receiving for this action.

But it's hard to see this as anything but inevitable given the recent behavior of China. Even while this measure was under consideration, China harassed Japanese coast guard vessels near the disputed Senkaku Islands. That is not the behavior of someone who wants peace except on his own terms. To be imposed violently if necessary.

While some will claim it heightens tensions in the region, it actually is in response to tensions already heightened by China. China has been playing a game of seeing its neighbors already divided, so it acts against them one by one. Japan is just about the only one of those neighbors capable of defending itself at sea (especially) and in the air. The Philippines, victims of Chinese aggression in the Spratlys and the Scarboroughs, are too weak, which is why they reached a deal with the US to base forces there once again. Vietnam, who fought a border clash with China in 1979 spurred on by Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge, has shown it is more than able to defend itself on land, but not at sea, which is one reason there has been talk of the US moving in there as well. The US already has relationships with Singapore (especially), Indonesia and Malaysia.

The problem is that, like most of our allies, these countries doubt the commitment of Barack Obama to defend them. In Japan's case it is especially critical, since the US is required to defend it as a result of its post-war constitution, Japan does not want its hands tied by an Obama-led US unwilling to honor its commitment to defend it. That is another major reason behind this move.

It is hard to overstate the depth of distrust for Japan in East Asia after its barbaric acts in the Pacific War, but Japan is an old enemy. China is rapidly making itself into a new enemy. And for countries too weak to defend themselves at sea and understandably mistrustful of Obama and his Smart Diplomacy™, Abe's act here gives East Asia another option for collective defense.

A forgotten relic of communism

Michael Totten has a fascinating article on the decades-old civil war in one of the least-known regions of the world - Western Sahara, a large, desolate strip of land on Africa's west coast just south of and administered by Morocco. Fidel Castro, Muammar Gadhafi and the Soviets decided to start trouble there in the 1970s by forming and funding a communist guerilla group known as the Polisario, who has been fighting a war in the region ever since. Charming people, those communists.

Obama must be proud

Our friends at Power Line opine on Obama's performance in Iraq:

The only problem is that Barack Obama may actually take this literally. To him and his leftist ilk, turning Iraq into Vietnam is not a bug, but a feature.

The potential of Benedict Bergdahl

Take this article with a grain of salt, but Robert Spencer has a piece giving 5 reasons to believe Bowe Bergdahl is not just guilty of being AWOL (Absent Without Leave) or desertion but of treason. To me, the most damning is actually Number Five:

5. The precision of post-desertion IEDs.
Former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow, who served with Bergdahl and was present the night he disappeared, says flatly:

Bergdahl is a deserter, and he’s not a hero. He needs to answer for what he did.” Even worse, Buetow recounted that days after Bergdahl vanished from the U.S. base, there were reports that he was in a nearby village looking for someone who spoke English, so that he could establish communications with the Taliban. Soon afterward, Buetow recalled, “IEDs started going off directly under the trucks. They were getting perfect hits every time. Their ambushes were very calculated, very methodical.”

Bergdahl knew where the trucks would be going and when; said Buetow: “We were incredibly worried” that the Taliban’s “prisoner of war” was passing this information on to his captors in order to help them place their bombs most effectively.

Forget rumors of his statements and whatnot. This is not rumor, but quantifiable evidence from his colleagues as to how how enemy tactics changed after Bergdahl ended up with the Taliban.

And by rumors, I am talking about the alleged letter that Bergdahl left behind:

2. The note he left behind.
Fox News reported Tuesday that according to “sources who had debriefed two former members of Bergdahl’s unit,” the deserter “left behind a note the night he left base in which he expressed disillusionment with the Army and being an American and suggested that he wanted to renounce his American citizenship and go find the Taliban.”

That letter has been reported in multiple media outlets. But now, it seems, there is serious question as to the existence of the note:

Three days ago, the New York Times cited a “former senior military officer” for the claim that Bergdahl had left a note behind in his tent the night he disappeared saying “he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life.” Pretty strong evidence of desertion; in fact, it’s the only hard evidence of Bergdahl’s motives that allegedly exists. The same day, Fox News reported that two unnamed former members of Bergdahl’s unit also claim that he left a note, and that the note suggested not only desertion but an intent to renounce his citizenship. All of this came as a shock to Saxby Chambliss, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had read the classified file on Bergdahl and saw nothing in there about a note.

That’s when things started to get weird.

Chambliss later said he was told that the report of the existence of the note was wrong.

The military’s classified 35-page report on Bergdahl’s disappearance also says nothing about a note. [...]
Did the letter mysteriously disappear or did it never exist at all?

A cautionary tale that reports gathered in wartime can have errors and omissions, not always or even usually intentional.

But the evidence of Benedict Bergdahl so far seems persuasive.

The Price of Moral Vanity

In the past I have used the term "moral vanity" to describe the desire of a person to show how much they care more than everyone else. Moral vanity usually manifests itself in 1. Committing ineffectual and sometimes dangerous or even counterproductive acts a to address a particular issue that carries intense emotion; and 2. A refusal to accept any criticism or even questioning of those acts, going so far as to insult and demonize those that do so.

Well, in a must-read column today, Roger Simon comes up with a similar, perhaps better term: Moral Narcissism.

Moral Narcissism is an evocative term for the almost schizophrenic divide between intentions and results now common in our culture.  It doesn’t matter how anything turns out as long as your intentions are good.  And, just as importantly, the only determinant of those intentions, the only one who defines them, is you.
In other words, if you propose or do something, it only matters that you feel good or righteous about what you did or are proposing, that it makes you feel better personally.  The results are irrelevant, as are how the actual activity affects others.
Also, although it pretends (especially to the self) to altruism, moral narcissism is in essence passive aggressive, asserting superiority over the ignorant or “selfish” other. It is elitist,  anti-democratic and quote often, consciously or unconsciously, sadistic.
The Obama administration is loaded with moral narcissists, including, obviously, the president himself — Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton etc.  The media and Hollywood are also clearly stuffed to the gills with moral narcissists.
Obamacare is a perfect example of moral narcissism in action.  Never mind that the public didn’t want it. Never mind it was an atrociously planned bureaucratic mess (in fact that comes with the territory).  It was what Barack Obama wanted — for himself.
Moral narcissism creates an atmosphere of dishonesty bizarrely similar to Islamic taqqiya.  In Islam, the believer is permitted to lie to the non-believer because the believer has the greater truth.  For the moral narcissist, lies becomes truth in almost the same manner. Some like Dan Rather (a moral narcissist par excellence) could thus pronounce the Bush National Guard papers real when anyone with an IQ in triple digits could see that they were fake.  They felt real to Dan. And, crucially, that made him feel good about himself.

As an aside, you might want to keep that taqqiya in mind when developing opinions on agreements and treaties with predominantly Muslim and especially Islamist parties. Anyway, Simon cites this characteristic as pushing the inexcusable Bowe Bergdahl trade:

In the Bergdahl affair, what really was operative in the prisoner swap was Barack Obama’s feelings about himself.  Never mind that Bergdahl may have been a deserter whose sympathies were with the enemy.  Never mind that many U.S. servicemen had already been killed attempting to rescue him. Never mind that the five released prisoners were all likely to resume their lives of terror as soon as possible, murdering who knows how many more people.  And never mind that the release of the terrorists would only encourage the Taliban to kidnap more hostages. What mattered was how Barack perceived himself.

Forget arrogance, incompetence, and a barely concealed anti-Americanism. The single unifying feature of the Obama administration is its utter selfishness.

Book signing for *Rising Sun, Falling Skies* on May 31

We are having a book reading and signing for Rising Sun, Falling Skies: The Disastrous Java Sea Campaign of World War II on May 31 from 2-4 pm at Indy Reads Books, 911 Massachusetts Avenue (the northeast end of Mass Ave), Indianapolis. Come one, come all, and bring any questions you have about the book or the Java Sea Campaign with you.

Correcting a historic mistake

Give Obama credit for this move: the US has reached a deal with the Philippines to allow the US military to operate from bases there, like Subic Bay and Clark Field, once again. I'm certain this is in part due to China's aggressive actions in East Asia, of which the Philippines have been a victim.

The Rule of Funny Hats

I am currently reading two books on Germany and Austria in World War I: Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire by Geoffrey Wawro, and The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig. And they offer nice, logical, academic explanations for their failure in World War I (two-front war, rebellious nationalities in Austria-Hungary, the incredible deterioration of the Austro-Hungarian army: arrogant, abusive, backstabbing Magyars running Hungary, etc.) And all these explanations are probably correct. But perhaps they can be summed up in two pictures:

Uh, Kaiser Franz Josef and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, do you realize that entire flocks of birds do not have as many feathers as you do on your hats?

Someone in the Prussian-dominated German Empire managed to convince all these powerful grown men, including Kaiser Wilhelm II and Field Marshal August von Mackensen, to wear helmets with big spikes on top. This particular helmet was called the pickelhaube. Apparently realizing how stupid the pickelhaube looked, during the war the Germans began to switch to the (in)famous stahlhelm, but by then the damage was done.

There should be established a general rule of thumb for wars and military conflicts that, all things being equal, the side most likely to lose is the one wearing the funniest hats.


Rising Sun, Falling Skies Q and A

My first book, Rising Sun, Falling Skies: The Disastrous Java Sea Campaign of World War II, is now out in stores and places like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Earlier this week, I did a Q and A with my publisher, Osprey, about the book:

1. What got you interested in the Battle of the Java Sea?
Somewhat of an odd story. I took a class on World War II when I was in 4^th grade, and wrote a report on World War II in the Pacific when I was in 5^th grade. My little 5^th grade report had nothing on the Battle of the Java Sea because there was very little information available to me on it – remember, this was a time before the Internet, before Amazon, before Alibris, so we were very limited into what books and other information we could access from our local bookstores and library. When I was in 7^th grade, my mom got me a compendium of the Pacific War called Combat Command, by Admiral Frederick Sherman, who among other things commanded the carrier Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea and a carrier task group at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. His was the first book in which I read a description of the Battle of the Java Sea. I found the story of the battle and the campaign completely enthralling, with this small group of servicemen from four different countries so far from home, so outnumbered, so outgunned, mostly cut off – and the only line against the darkness that was about to overtake East Asia and most of the Pacific. But the description in Sherman’s book was incomplete, somewhat generalized, and missing a lot of information, largely because the information on which the admiral based that description was incomplete. The problem for me was that I could find almost nothing else on the battle. For years, all I could find were general descriptions of the battle or snippets from it. I found it incredibly frustrating to find a wealth of information on so many other battles and campaigns and almost nothing on this. So for years I just grabbed any book, any report, and scrap of paper I came across that had any information about the battle. It became somewhat of an obsession. I was determined to someday figure out precisely what happened in this battle and this campaign.

2. What do you see as the difference between Rising Sun, Falling Skies and other books about the Java Sea Campaign?
The big thing I noticed over the years is that while there are quite a few very good books that deal with parts of the campaign – like the US cruiser Houston, the US Asiatic Fleet, Patrol Wing 10, the Far East Air Force, etc. – there is very little out there that deals with the Java Sea naval campaign as a whole. Each of these sources gives some good information and different takes on their individual pieces of the story of the Java Sea Campaign, but they are only pieces. Which is fine, because that’s what they’re intended to do. But a Dutch account won’t usually include the Battle of Balikpapan. A British account won’t often include the Battle of Badoeng Strait. American accounts don’t always get into the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, let alone the controversy behind it. The naval accounts often mention the lack of air power in passing without a description of how exactly that lack of air power came about. The efforts of the submarines are often ignored. Yet these are all pieces of the same Java Sea Campaign. I’ve wanted for years to assemble these pieces into sort of a global account of the entire Java Sea Campaign, with analysis of my own that I had developed over time, in order to give each of these pieces big and small some context.

3. Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, the Allied commander, is usually seen as valiant but incompetent, at least in English speaking countries. You have a different view of him. Why?
There is this idea, especially in the US, that people should be judged solely by outcomes. For instance, in baseball, if a pitcher loses a game, it must be his fault. Doesn’t matter if he only gave up a solo home run and lost when his offense was shut out, it must be his fault. That thinking extends to history as well. But you can make every correct decision, every correct judgment, and still lose. Karel Doorman lost every battle in which his Combined Striking Force fought, it is true. But if you examine his decisions in the context of what he was facing, the information he had, and the orders he had, those decisions, which were mostly close calls with no obvious answers, were, for the most part, sound. At worst, they were defensible. Doorman was caught in a web of contradictions. His own take on the campaign – that it was hopeless without adequate air power – was contradictory to that of his Dutch superiors, but completely in agreement with his American and British colleagues – who were actually his biggest critics. He has been criticized for being both too aggressive and too cautious – often at the same time. He has been criticized for not training his ships – when, as his American superiors admitted, he had no chance to do so. In short, it seems like no matter what Doorman did or could have done, he was going to be ripped by a lot of people. And he seems to have known this. If one examines his conduct throughout the Java Sea Campaign, the single unifying theme is the protection of the men under his command so that they would not be sacrificed needlessly without a chance to cause significant loss to the enemy. When there was no chance to cause loss to the enemy, he would have his ships withdraw – at the cost of his own life in the Battle of the Java Sea. In the midst of an almost impossible situation, Doorman ignored the cost to himself and put his men first. That by itself is highly admirable, and he has not gotten nearly enough credit for it. Doorman seems to have been a very private person, with few people to defend him after he was no longer able to defend himself. It is time someone stepped up to defend him and call attention to the positives of this brave, intelligent, and humane officer.

4. Could the ABDA force have done anything to win?
Superficially, one would think so. At the Battle of the Java Sea, the forces were evenly matched on paper. But the ABDA Combined Striking Force was really a hollow shell. If you imagine the battle as two knights fighting each other, the Japanese were a samurai in polished armor with a sharpened katana and the Combined Striking Force was a knight in completely rusted armor with a dull sword and a cracked shield. Yes, they might have been able to do something to increase the likelihood of some sort of battlefield victory – Use their lone spotter plane? Drive straight toward the Japanese cruisers come hell or high water instead of turning away? – but they would have had to fight an absolutely perfect battle to do so. And no battle is ever fought absolutely perfectly. One shot from the Japanese and they would shatter. Which is precisely what happened.

5. Why is the Battle of the Java Sea significant?
Quite a few reasons, actually, so I’ll try to be limited. From the standpoint of the Pacific War overall, the Battle of the Java Sea was the first instance of the arrogance, overconfidence, and sloppiness that was slowly but surely infecting the Imperial Japanese Navy directly affecting its battlefield performance, although they won the battle in spite of it. Perhaps most enduringly, there was the Combined Striking Force itself, and, for that matter, all of ABDACOM – a multinational force that was not modular, as such forces had been throughout history, but was fully if imperfectly integrated. Over the years those imperfections would be sufficiently worked out to become the model for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. From a philosophical standpoint, the Java Sea Campaign is more evidence that in terms of defense and foreign policy, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. You can’t neglect defense for 20 years as the Allies did with shoestring budgets and wishful thinking and then adequately rearm when war is on your doorstep. The fighting men of ABDACOM paid the price, in some cases the ultimate price, for that neglect. Finally, there are some simple but often forgotten principles in today’s nuanced world: that when your friends are in trouble, you stand beside them and fight alongside them, and that, even if there is little or no chance of winning, there is inherent value in fighting evil – and make no mistake; in the Pacific War the behavior and objectives of the Japanese were nothing short of evil.

6. What do you hope to achieve with Rising Sun, Falling Skies?
Two goals, really. The first and far more important of the two is to get the story of these American, British, Dutch, and Australian fighting men out there. It should be emphasized that this is their story, not mine; I am merely the vehicle for telling it, for trying to put it into context. Instead of marching triumphantly to liberate the Pacific from Japanese tyranny, many of these men lost their lives or were forced to endure the horrors of Japanese POW camps. More than a few histories of the Pacific War almost – almost – skip over the Java Sea Campaign, going from the disaster at Pearl Harbor to stopping the Japanese advance at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942 while blurring most of the unpleasantness in between, stopping briefly to mention the Bataan Death March and Corregidor. In my opinion, the men who fought the Java Sea Campaign have never gotten the credit they deserve. Rising Sun, Falling Skies is my own effort to help rectify that oversight in some small way. A secondary goal is to attract more people to the history genre. In writing Rising Sun, Falling Skies, I have tried to strike a balance between scholarship and readability. Despite the length and all the end notes to give authors proper credit and give readers a chance to check my work and decide for themselves as to the proper conclusions, I have also tried to keep the language somewhat informal, to keep the military terminology to a minimum, and to explain military or nautical terms to unfamiliar readers. I wanted the Rising Sun, Falling Skies to be approachable, especially to a new generation of readers. To attract them to history. The fastest and perhaps most accurate way to study history is to study its wars. History is not boring words about dead people. History is alive, exciting, even changing, and still affecting us today. Why are the Chinese and Japanese sparring over the Senkaku Islands? Because of the Pacific War. They never came to real terms with each other after the Pacific War or over the two wars they fought previously. And they are perhaps closer than many think to fighting their next war. We cannot have an idea of where we are going if we do not know where we have been.