We didn’t start the war —I’m happy we won.
But did FDR *want* to war on Japan with no moral responsibility for STARTING it? Why, yes —that’s absolutely true.
And Churchill very badly wanted FDR in the war, and the two had been working for quite some time on how to manage it, when presto, finally the Japanese threw the solution right into their laps.
Did Japan deserve to get whipped? Oh sure..!
They didn’t attack just the USA —they attacked Hong Kong, Singapore, Malasia, Vietnam, Australia, the British, and others, and ALL AT ONCE.
In fact, in Singapore when they took over the hospitals, they went from bed to bed, simply bayonetting doctors and patients. They even shot nurses and doctors performing surgery.
It also turned out that the IJA had made absolutely NO PLANS AT ALL for provisioning for POWs and conquered peoples —nothing at all.
Some genius (and I say genius since these things usually happen with just a single planner) realized that he had to use the existing resources to acquire oil in just about 30 days, so some things were possible and others weren't.
There was little margin for error so the planner simply chopped off all the "nice to have" stuff ~ leaving himself with an air attack on Pearl Harbor, main battle groups to Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and as soon as that was clear the tankers were sent to the oil fields ~
Later on, in the exuberance of victory somebody else sent units to the Aleutians, Sakhalin and beyond, and to screw around in the South Pacific.
They ended up with a great deal of their ground combat units bogged down on islands we never attacked nor needed to attack. The Japanese were forced to supply those troops on those islands with ships that were probably needed to support activity in China. The Chinese venture continued, and then got worse when the US used safe areas in China as landing pads for bombings of the Japanese Home islands.
One thing led to the next and the US ended up with the whole enchilada!
If the Japanese could have counted on a 6 month supply of oil back in 1941, they'd spent more time planning the attack because that was going to happen anyway whether we cut off their oil or kept sending.
All the theories that place the blame on FDR necessarily assume the Japanese didn't know how to plan major war movements ~ and that's just crazy talk!