In 1941, says Dower, the Japanese forces grossly miscalculated how the United States would respond. And there was no longer-range thinking of how.

There was no looking ahead to anticipate what do we do after?' In both cases, the Japanese and the U.S., respectively, 'were mesmerized by the initial opening offensive activities. 'In the case of Iraq, as in the case of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, there was no endgame. There was no thinking ahead, and then the comparison gets very interesting. The Iraq invasion, says Dower, 'was a true intelligence disaster. the disaster at Pearl Harbor, why we were caught short, compared it to what we know about 9/11.' And as the United States began a march to war, culminating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Dower began seeing the similarities between those intelligence failures piling up. 'So I went back and reread all the studies of.

intelligence, he says - a failure in which he saw other eerie echoes of World War II. 11 attacks also represented an 'enormous failure' of U.S. 'The immediate connection everyone made was Pearl Harbor,' he tells NPR's Neal Conan. Historian John Dower, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq, anticipated the WWII references as soon as he learned that terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Within days, other World War II terms like 'ground zero' and 'kamikaze pilots' had become common parlance. 12, 2001, newspaper headlines nationwide read 'Day Of Infamy' - harkening back to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Dower won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II.

Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower