Yes, this story has been around forever. Here's Howard Zinn's take, from *A People's History of the United States*, page 402:
***Putting aside the wild accusations against Roosevelt (that he knew about Pearl Harbor and didn't tell, or that he deliberately provoked the Pearl Harbor raid-- these are without evidence), it does seem clear that he did as James Polk had done before him in the Mexican war and Lyndon Johnson after him in the Vietnam war-- he lied to the public for what he thought was a right cause. In September and October 1941, he misstated the facts in two incidents involving German submarines and American destroyers. A historian sympathetic to Roosevelt, Thomas A. Bailey, has written:
Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor... He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient's own good... because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats...
One of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial after World War II, Radhabinod Pal, dissented from the general verdicts against Japanese officials and argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act. Richard Minear (Victors' Justice) sums up Pal's view of the embargoes on scrap iron and oil, that "these measures were a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence." The records show that a White House conference two weeks before Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should be justified.
A State Department memorandum on Japanese expansion, a year before Pearl Har bor, did not talk of the independence of China or the principle of self-determination. It said:
... our general diplomatic and strategic position would be considerably weakened-- by our loss of Chinese, Indian and South Seas markets (and by our loss of much of the Japanese market for our goods, as Japan would become more and more self-sufficient) as well as by insurmountable restrictions upon our access to the rubber, tin, jute, and other vital materials of the Asian and Oceanic regions.***
FDR may not have known specifically that Pearl Harbor would be attacked, but he figured the embargo would force an attack somewhere, and this would presumably swing Congressional opinion. The point is that his purpose in all this was not so much to liberate Asian countries from Japanese hegemony as to restore Euro-American dominance. Thus the embargo had no moral justification.
Ted