Jennifer Szalai reviews Elizabeth Samet’s Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness:
Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.”
It is indisputable that WWII has been mythologized and sanitized over the decades, and looking at our foreign policy debates since then we can see how this has had harmful effects on how Americans think about matters of war. Because it is the last major war that the United States undeniably won, it served as the foundation of all later postwar triumphalism that convinced policymakers that because “we did it” in WWII we could “do it” again in some other part of the world. This has led to reckless intervention after reckless intervention from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond. Invoking WWII and its aftermath as models and justifications was all the rage in the early 2000s when our neo-imperialists wanted to prove that the U.S. knew how to do regime change and nation-building.
The war supercharged our existing sense of self-righteousness and provided an extensive supply of fuel for new crusading policies. The shadow of the war has also distorted our foreign policy debate ever since appeasement and Munich became bywords for ridiculing diplomatic compromises to avoid costly wars. Victory in the war carried with it the curse of believing that militarism and confrontation are how to provide security, and that belief has poisoned the thinking of many American policymakers ever since. The strange cult of Churchill that has prevailed in the U.S. because of his role in the war has reinforced this kind of thinking. Each new adversary is portrayed as if they are the next Nazi menace. As Marilyn Young observed, “In virtually every military action since 1975, the administration in charge has tried to appropriate the images and language of World War II. Thus, Manuel Noriega, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein (twice) were roundly denounced as the…Hitler du jour; September 11, 2001, of course, is the twenty-first century Pearl Harbor.”1
There has been a tendency to make the extremely unusual experience of total victory into the model that all subsequent wars should imitate. That has encouraged many Americans to believe that anything short of the obliteration of an adversary is failure. It has also encouraged later leaders to set dangerous and maximalist policy goals that cannot be reached without invasion and occupation of the other country. The memory of WWII has also encouraged many American policymakers to view all adversaries simply as aggressors with illegitimate ambitions of conquest rather than states with their own legitimate interests and security fears.
Because WWII has been mythologized as “the Good War,” it has been common for Americans over the last 75 years to minimize or ignore the atrocities committed by the Allies. But then when the U.S. and its allies and clients have committed war crimes in later wars, the atrocities committed against civilians with strategic and nuclear bombings in WWII are used to dismiss these other crimes as minuscule by comparison. If you criticize a modern bombing campaign for using disproportionate force, there are bound to be a dozen hawks ready to answer, “Well, what about the fire bombing of Tokyo?”
To the extent that the atrocities are acknowledged, they are often rationalized away with ends-justifying-the-means arguments: if these atrocities were “necessary” to win the “Good War,” we shouldn’t condemn them. Every August, we are treated to a disturbing display of excusing the mass murder of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the name of “necessity” when there are ample contemporary witnesses to the fact that neither of those attacks was needed to bring the war to an end.
WWII became the benchmark against which all other wars should be measured, and this has been harmful because WWII was such an abnormal and extraordinarily destructive war. If that is what Americans have learned to think that war should be, that gives Americans a very warped understanding of war. Insofar as the “Good War” has led many Americans to conclude that war can actually be good, it has had a deeply corrupting effect on our country.
Young, “Permanent War,” Making the Forever War: p. 166.