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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U.S. and Japan war culture
We read this book for my 20th century American International relations class. No one in my class seemed to really like and had a tough time understanding it. One of my classmates actually read his Embracing Defeat book and said it was a lot better. We didn't get to talk too much about it since there were three other books we had to read. I found a lecture John Dower gave on Cultures of War in 2004 at UC Santa Barbera on Youtube and I liked the lecture alot. I decided to read Cultures of War again and enjoyed the book a lot more a second time around.What I liked about the book is it focuses on Japan and U.S. since they both have strong military cultures. I think Dower is trying to understand why Japan and U.S. start wars and continue to fight in them when it appears they can't win. Cultures of War compares and contrasts the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atomic weapons used against Japan, the 9/11/01 terrorists attacks, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Dower looks at this events and looks at how it leads to war. I like how Dower says these countries governments use propaganda to portray the victims of these attacks as innocent and people tend to forget why they were attacked in the first place. For example, the US began to cut it's oil supply off to Japan during WWII and Japan was forced to invade Pacific islands for more resources.I found reading Cultures of War to be similar in some ways to reading Lies My Teacher Told Me in that it sheds some light on events during WWII. I didn't know more Japanese died during the U.S. fire bombing over Japan then the atomic bomb drops over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also there was a lot more discussion about using the atomic weapons over Japan and a lot more reasons went behind using them then just saving Allied soldiers.The only thing I didn't like about this book is Dower talks about how the Allies began bombing civilian targets as the war progressed. The Allies were originally very against bombing civilian targets. He used a quote from Ed McNamara "If we lost the war, we would've been tried as war criminals." I don't if he really means that because I don't think the Axis powers would've had a trial for the Allies since the Axis powers had Fascist governments. If Dower meant the Allies did some things during WWII they would consider themselves to be "war criminal" then I would agree with him after reading his book.
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