Remember Pearl Harbor, Then Put It Behind Us : War: Surprise attack is a time-honored strategy; 50 years is long enough to keep a misguided grudge.

President Bush and Kiichi Miyazawa, Japan’s new prime minister, should commemorate the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor next month by meeting at the American naval base in Hawaii.

Their object should be not merely to give voice to flights of rhetoric, but to announce meaningful mutual concessions to help ease present tensions.

Before that can happen, however, Americans must give up the self-righteous notion that we were an angelic bystander in December, 1941, when Japanese airmen mugged the U.S. Navy. The fact is, we had done much to provoke that Japanese attack, including cutting off their supply of oil and high-octane aviation fuel the previous summer.

Furthermore, Japan’s surprise attack may well have seemed “dastardly” to Americans, as President Roosevelt phrased it at the time, but it was hardly unique.

Lord Nelson’s surprise attack on Copenhagen in 1801 destroyed the Danish fleet, but no one (outside of Denmark) ever said that day would live in infamy.

The United States Army made a “sneak attack” on Mexico in 1846 when our troops invaded Mexican territory before Congress got around to declaring that a state of war existed. And, far from feeling ashamed about it, we later elected as President the commander who led that expedition, Zachary Taylor.

In June, 1967, Israel carried out a surprise attack against Egypt, and was widely hailed in the West for its adroitness in destroying almost the entire Egyptian air force while it was still on the ground.

Virtually every major power has resorted to surprise attack when it suited its convenience, according to a study made by the British Army officer and historian Sir Frederick Maurice.

Maurice calculated that between 1700 and 1870, France carried out 36 surprise attacks, Britain 30, Austria 12, Russia 7, (not counting its habitual practice toward Turkey and China), Prussia 7, and the United States at least 5.

A penchant for back-stabbing is all too human, and no one, not even the Japanese, holds the patent.

Furthermore, the Japanese offensive against the United States in 1941 was conceived and meticulously spelled out not by a Japanese warlord but by a British naval expert.

Hector C. Bywater, the leading naval authority in the period between the two world wars, published a book in 1925 in which he showed that Japan could build a nearly invulnerable island empire in the western Pacific by destroying the American naval force with a surprise attack, simultaneously capturing the Philippines and Guam and militarizing the former German islands mandated to Japan by the League of Nations.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, later the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack and other aspects of the Japanese offensive in 1941, happened to be the Japanese naval attache in Washington at the time Bywater’s book was causing heated discussion. Yamamoto reported back to Tokyo on the contents of the book. When he returned to Japan, he gave a lecture in which he adopted as his own Bywater’s strategic ideas for a possible war against the United States.

Many years after Bywater’s ideas had become encoded in his mind, Yamamoto put them to the test, employing everything from Bywater’s overall strategy to such small but critical details as the precise beaches on which invading forces were to land.

The fact that Yamamoto seized on someone else’s ideas does not absolve him of the responsibility for his actions, but what the Bywater connection makes clear is the fact that the Pearl Harbor attack was not uniquely Japanese.

As is so often the case, the facts of history don’t square with our self-righteous conviction that our enemies are depraved while we are virtuous.

We must overcome this narrowness, and learn to look upon Pearl Harbor as we now look upon the fields of Gettysburg--as the scene of tragedy, not treachery, and as a reminder of the failure of two nations rather than the culpability of a single outlaw.

That understanding must be the foundation for a productive summit meeting at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1991.