Ain't hindsight wonderful? Pat's rhetoric is always catchy, with his new phrase the "War Party" emerging as his latest hook. If he was as good at REAL politics, as he is at writing, he himself could sit in the seats of power.
For the sake of accuracy, it looks like the Bush administration will press Iraq to honor the 1991 Cease Fire terms, and allow WMD inspectors to again do their jobs. Would Pat Buchanan have the world just let Saddam continue with WMD, until he uses them?
The Japanese were acting in a totally inhuman and cruel manner for all the world to see, demonstrating that further Japanese conquest endangered all free nations. That's why we embargoed them. If they had merely sent "peacekeepers" to unsettled regions in China, they would not have been embargoed.
Buchanan has some blind spots in his soul.
The point is that what Japan was doing was no different than what the USA, Britain, France or the USSR were doing. The USA was built by military conquest. In the 1930s and 1940s the British Empire had 1/4 of the world enslaved. The USSR enagged in many acts of imperialist aggression against Poland in 1920 and 1939 as well as against Finland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. There was not a peep of complaint from the liberal American press at these acts of Communist Soviet aggression. The same liberals that were so quick to complain about German, Italian and Japanese imperialism were perfecty happy in supporting Communist, British and French imperialism.
Hindsight is 20-20, and it may be easy for Pat to armchair quarterback and make all the right moves 50 years later, but at least he has some sense of history and learns from it.
Unlike so many professional politicians who don't have any clue about history and are doomed to repeat it over and over...