Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)If you like history and often find true events stranger than fiction, you'll find Cultures of War entertaining. Some readers will be alarmed because this book is highly critical of the Bush Administration's use of history to prepare the American people for the decision to go to war in Iraq. Author John W. Dower, Harvard PhD and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, strips out propaganda and presents a viewpoint of what happened and what almost happened in our recent military conflicts.
The book, Cultures of War, juxtaposes Pearl Harbor with 9-11 to amazing effect. Here we get the impression that nothing is new under the sun. We see political leaders playing the same set of cards, populations falling in line as hoped, empires growing and waning - and tragedy. Nothing changes because human nature doesn't change.
For example, the leaders of imperial Japan that launched a surprise attack against the U.S. at Pearl Harbor believed they would emerge at the head of the largest unified territory in the history of the world. They planned an East Asia Cooperative Body that would include much of the Middle East, Australia, India and some of the Soviet Union, with the Yamato race occupying the seat of authority. This type of grand thinking is compared to that of former Vice President Cheney. In an interview with BBC in November 2001, Cheney spoke of targeting "as many as 40 to 50" nations for a range of actions including military force for harboring enemy terrorist cells. In their times, this all seemed somewhat plausible.
Dower explains the tendency toward groupthink that nurses risky military policy. It takes awhile for aggressive new policy ideas to gain traction, but thanks to the influence of the media and the skilled use of propaganda/advertising, almost anything can be made to seem normal. He traces the doctrine of preemptive war to military policy guidelines authored by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992. These guidelines were derided when leaked to the media at the time. However, years later the same guidelines went mainstream in the Bush Doctrine. This was the ideological underpinning used to justify preemptive war even if the threat was not immediate; unilateral withdrawals from international treaties; a policy to spread democracy around the world in order to combat terrorism; and a willingness to use the military to accomplish foreign policy goals.
Cultures of War shows how setbacks and failure sow the seeds of renewal. The rise of Japan as an economic powerhouse after World War II is examined and then compared in some ways to the American response to the quagmire that the Iraq War had become. In 2007 when Americans had reached a tipping point of opinion about the war, General Petraeus was promoted to commanding general to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq. Petraeus announced, "The people are the prize." With this new counterinsurgency strategy - to win the support of the local populations in Iraq by becoming one with them, U.S. fortunes on the battlefield greatly improved in that theater of operations.
There is much more to say about Cultures of War including the use of racist propaganda by all sides, all war belligerents. The analysis on what makes an occupation successful or not alone justifies the price of this book for political and military leaders. I highly recommend Cultures of War.
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