Personally I don't see the problem in admitting that someone did something well, just because you don't like why they did it. Are we obligated to say "the Japanese sucked at everything" for eternity for political reasons?
Grr, Newt said something nice about wartime Japan. What's the objection to the statement? Logic or emotion? I'd say it's an appeal to emotion: The Japanese were BAD so it's wrong to say anything GOOD about them. Which is just plain "victor's history" style political correctness.
What the Japanese did was a masterstroke of military planning, and coming only mere decades after they industrialized was a huge achievement. The fact that we were the targets doesn't make it any less impressive that they pulled that off.
The problem is is that it's just plain wrong. Pearl Harbor was an act of unimaginable stupidity, that got them into a fight they couldn't win, and that they didn't even need to fight in the first place. The United States would not have gone to war with the force it did over Dutch colonies, if it would even go to war with them at all over them. An attack on American soil was a different matter entirely.
That's obvious
now, but from the Japanese perspective in 1941 it looks pretty different. They considered the very existence of the US-occupied Philippines to be the equivalent of a gun pointed right at their head, and thought that a few decisive victories would cause the US to stop fighting.
Most importantly, they thought that we'd regard Hawaii and the Philippines as unimportant colonial possessions not worth fighting an expensive war over, especially since they didn't even try to take Hawaii away. The notion that the US would react with the same level of vehemence as if D.C. had been bombed instead never crossed their minds.
@smjjames
All of the military infrastructure at Pearl Harbor was smashed. The entire point of the attack was to keep the US from being able to launch a counterattack until the Empire had built up enough and taken enough forward bases that the US would be unwilling to pay the cost of smashing through.