Quote:
Originally Posted by Red October1984
+1 
I just have so little faith in our population...I know there'd still be a group of people (maybe like....California, Florida, etc  ) protesting the war no matter what happened.
Iran might not have been a good example....but how about Russia?
Or some Asian aggressor? 
Would it take another Pearl Harbor to unite the country? |
Oh, definitely, even in the depths of World War II there were protests against it, both in your country and in mine. The most amusing of which was the socialist ones who were fiercely anti-war right up until Operation Barbarossa and then, strangely enough, they became very pro-war.
Then there's the isolationist movement, popular in America both pre and post war, and I don't think that Charles Lindbergh would be a modern day Californian.
Russia...or China for that matter is a difficult one, because of their nuclear arsenal, no one would want mutually assured destruction, and you have to look at the peace protests throughout the west (and no doubt there would have been the same in the east if they had been permitted or publicised) during the Cold War, but certainly a Pearl Harbor style attack would inflame public opinion to the point of support in general, but not fully because that would be impossible, after all to this day there are people who argue that both Pearl and 9/11 were inside jobs, but that's another topic of worms entirely.
If one were to look at the general public reaction in American on the 10th September 2001, it was almost overwhelmingly in favour of not only invading Afghanistan but erasing it from the map, shock is very quickly replaced by anger, and with that wave of anger over a decade of long and bloody occupation began. Of course, waves of emotion swiftly break upon the cold hard wall of reality, and that reality has pushed the American public, when they are reminded of the war, into a fierce anti-war stance, and not just the American public but most of the nations that were involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, you only have to look at the recent events in Syria and the general opinion in Europe and America about taking military action against Assads regime. Once bitten, twice shy, as the saying goes.
So, a Pearl Harbor style event would certainly inflame public opinion in support of a war, but it wouldn't last long. Imagine what the American public would have been like if Operation Olympic had gone ahead? If the Japanese hadn't surrendered and the Allied forces had been forced to fight mile after bloody mile into Japan. I think that public support for total surrender would have started to wane and with the Soviet Union looking hungrily across the Sakhalin straits the US may have been forced into a position that it didn't want to take.