Utterly wrong. You have the tail wagging the dog.
Definitely. As has been repeatedly explained on these boards, Pearl Harbor was a very late addition to a preexisting set of war plans. It was not the rationale behind the war and it was very nearly not approved.
When "selling" the idea of the Pearl attack to the Naval General Staff, Yamamoto faced resistance because it was a very late addition to a complicated series of operations, because it risked assets needed for those other operations, and because it turned Japan's prewar naval strategy on it's head.
Japan had planned for decades to attrit the US Navy as it advanced across the Pacific prior to a decisive battle whose predicted location had slowly shifted from off Japan to off Okinawa to off the Philippines. Yamamoto challenged that thinking and the planning behind it.
Japan was going to war in late 1941 with the Western powers regardless of where the US Pacific fleet was stationed. All the move to Pearl did was put that fleet (barely) within reach of Japan's carrier forces and thus allow Japan to risk the raid whose 70th anniversary we're marking today.
Quite frankly, Pearl Harbor is discussed so often on these boards I find it exceedingly odd that someone could be so unaware of the basic facts of the raid.
I'm sorry, I believe you are misunderstanding the reasoning behind the PH attack.
Japan would, in an ideal world, probably have preferred the USA and the Dutch to keep supplying them with the raw materials they needed to fight ni China, while NOT supplying the Chinese with weapons. If that had been the case, I think it highly unlikely they would have attacked the USA at that point.
However....
The IJN doctrine of attrition on the US fleet as it sailed westward, while the theme in the 20's and early 30's, was being subject to revision, or at least re-evaluation. This was because technical factors (for example, the increasing reliability of the ships), mean that the level of attrition was reducing. This meant the IJN needed more ships and planes. However there was a limit to what the IJN could build and support (yes, even the IJN didnt have a bottomless war chest).
Secondly, in 1940 the US congress had a fit over the fall of France, and passed the funding for such a massive naval program that the IJN simply couldnt match it.
Now the IJN is looking in a few years at a navy so large the attrition/decicive battle strategy simply wont work. So either they admit that what they do in the Pacific and China is basically at US sufferance, or they do something about it.
The PH scheme was a brilliant solution to the problem the IJN had (remember, their promlem as they see it isnt necessarily as WE would see it). By seriously damaging US naval power, before the big buildup was ready, it meant that the decisive battle would again be to the IJN advantage (remember, just because the USN had no interest in fighting one, especaiily with its BB's sitting on the putty at Pearl, doesnt mean the IJN didnt think they would).
No other scheme had anything like the chance of rigging the decisive battle in the IJN favour nearly as much.
And it wasnt that late an addition. The IJN had been considering some sort of attack for a long while, but never really had a good plan that had a reasonable chance of success. That changed after Taranto, when the FAA demonstrated that torpedoes could work in a shallow harbour (like Pearl). But they had been loking at an attack already, however the ability to use torpedoes(which at that time were THE way of sinking a BB, in anyones navy), meant that serious planning would raise far fewer objections.