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Cultures Of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq (2010)

by John W. Dower(Favorite Author)

3.91 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0393061507 (ISBN13: 9780393061505)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Dower analyzes the misuse and abuse of historical references and analogies to World War II - Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, post-war reconstruction in Japan - as the Bush administration applied them in its rhetoric following 9-11 and leading into the invasion of Iraq. The commentary aims to expose - or at least to remind us of - the myths and the flawed logic prevalent throughout the Bush administration's post-9/11 response and also provides enlightening historical accounts from the Pacific War and its aftermath worth reading for themselves. The last segment of the book - considering comparisons between post-war Japan and Iraq - is the strongest, although the first section is very good, too. The middle section covers old ground in the debates over the decision to drop the atomic... more bomb on Hiroshima; Dower's analysis is sound but doesn't add much beyond what others have already written, aside from its connection to the overall premise of the book.
review 2: Dower has written a book comparing the causes and endgames of the war we waged against Japan in the Pacific with the more recent war in Iraq. There are many similarities. The intelligence failure resulting in 9/11 brought an immediate investigation which compared it to the intelligence lapse at Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. In pursuing its war on terror, America's deciding on a preemptive war in Iraq mirrors the same tactical triumph resulting in strategic stupidity Japan displayed in attacking the western powers in 1941. His history ends with a comparison of the occupation of Japan with that in Iraq. His perspective is that in Japan our steady, clearheaded policy of economic reconstruction (plus, it seems, the impetus the Korean War gave to their economy) and gradual de-emphasis of the cult of emperor worship was largely responsible for winning the peace. In Iraq, he writes, there was no peace following the war because our lack of planning, the purge of the Baath Party, and the disastrous dissolution of all Iraqi military formations left no authority to assist America's inadequate military and provisional governments. Further, in Japan a democracy was in place on which to base a reconstruction. In Iraq the Bush administration tried to forge a democracy out of managerial and organizational shortcomings, with disastrous results.My response to the book was one of contrasts, too. The early reading is something of a polemic. I don't really doubt the truth of Dower's ideas. It's that I take issue with his flattening out of facts and dodging considered analysis in order to make a point. Statements of half-truth history such as claiming the burst of America's imperialism in the period between 1895 and 1905 gave us a gulag in Guantanamo make me raise my eyebrows. The longer one reads in the book, however, the better Dower's history becomes. As his discussion works its way through wars of choice, Hiroshima and the bombing of noncombatants, and the similarities between the faith-based secular thinking of Japan, the Bush presidency and Bin Laden's jihad to come at last to the contrast of the successful occupation of Japan with the failed occupation of Iraq, his analysis has become measured, sound, and convincing. Despite the book's 2 faces, it's thoroughly interesting. less

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