You make some good points and I agree with much of what you say, but there is one serious flaw in your post above.
Your argument that “we pushed Japan into a corner, which lead to Pearl Harbor” seems to suggest that Japan had no choice but to attack Pearl Harbor. This claim, of course, is nonsense. Japan had a choice. They certainly were not forced into planning and launching a large, sophisticated naval attack. Japan choose to use force in an attempt to alter US policy. It was a poor choice.
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Pri: Ogre makes good points? Uh, where? I’ve heard of rank revisionism, but this takes it to a whole new level.
The Japanese push began during the First World War, when Japan was a titular Allied power. The Japanese in 1915 issued what were known as the “Twenty-One Demands”: http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/21demands.htm, essentially designed to grant the Japanese ascendancy over China and Chinese land and holdings.
As far as “painting Japan into a corner”, perhaps Mr. Ogre is referring to the Washington Conference of 1921: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/636484/Washington-Conference, which was held to limit the naval arms race in the Pacific and address rising concerns over Japanese militarism in the region.
FDR ran on an explicitly anti-war platform and was committed to keeping the US out of the war. The fact that the US was so woefully unprepared when war was declared against Japan and Germany significantly undercuts the assertion that FDR “wanted in” on WWII. The US Army was nowhere near being ready to take on either Japan or Germany and FDR had had since September 1939 to prepare. If this was indeed a fait accompli, one would think that FDR would have done a better job of being ready for it. A brief history of US Army mobilization here: http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/brief/overview.htm#2, and this details Army preparedness (and lack thereof) from the interwar years (1918 – 1941), as well as the “crash course” the US took following the Pearl Harbor attack.
The alternative theory that somehow Japan was “pushed” into war is risible. The Japanese had been pursuing an aggressive campaign of conquest that dated back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 – 1905 (http://www.onwar.com/aced/data/romeo/russojapanese1904.htm) and viewed China and her territories in much the same way that Hitler viewed the wide open spaces of Eastern Europe: As “living spaces” (lebensraum) for German “settlers”. The Japanese had a growing populace and the Great Depression had struck Japan hard, forcing them to seek settlement space for the excess Japanese citizenry, in addition to seizing Chinese industrial facilities.
Pseudo-intellectual claptrap notwithstanding, this attempt at somehow painting Japan as victim (especially the sickening comment about the Japanese “holocaust”) completely unravels when you consider the actual facts.
