Review of “Cultures of War” by John W. Dower

John Dower is one of our most respected historians, having won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his brilliant studies of the war against Japan in World War II. In Cultures of War, he again returns to Japan in WWII, this time to compare the U.S. response to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war with Japan to the attack of 9/11 on the U.S. and subsequent war against Iraq.

Dower argues that the “clash of civilizations” argument to explain both wars is insufficient to understand why they took place, and in any event, is based on a postulate of “an imagined essentialism” about everyone in the cultures in question. It is largely invoked to contrast the alleged rational and enlightened outlook of Westerners with the irrational, nonwhite Eastern foreigner. But as Dower maintains, as often as the West exhibits “more civilized” behavior, it is also apt to exhibit “wishful thinking, delusion, and herd behavior” at top levels of government. For example, he shows how irrational notions characterized both the American attitude toward the Japanese before WWII, and toward the Islamists six decades later. As an example, he cites the Admiral of the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor explaining why he ignored “war warning” messages just prior to the attack:

I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack, so far from Japan.”

Similarly, in spite of repeated warnings about bin Laden and Al Qaeda from the CIA and the National Security Council, the Bush Administration chose to ignore them. As Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s “bin Laden unit” until 1999 reported:

The elites simply could not fathom that ‘a polyglot bunch of Arabs wearing robes, sporting scraggly beards, and squatting around campfires in Afghan deserts and mountains could pose a mortal threat the United States.’”

In other words, the U.S. was surprised both in 1941 and 2001 because of the same “racial arrogance and cultural condescension.”

Aftermath of the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo, March, 1945

Furthermore, Dower charges, it is absurd to assert that the Japanese in the 1940’s or the Islamists, Muslims and Arabs in current times, do not value human life as much as people do in the West, just because so many civilians died on 9/11. The U.S. can only make this argument by sanitizing our own history. Dower adduces plenty of evidence to show that the Allies deliberately targeted civilians in WWII with fire bombing to “break morale.” He reserves special disgust for “the ardor” with which the U.S. military reconstructed German and Japanese houses in the U.S. desert beginning in 1943, to test how thoroughly they could be incinerated. And in fact, “somewhere around one million German and Japanese noncombatants were killed in Allied bombing missions between 1943 and 1945.”

Cartoon from a Muslim publication decrying hypocrisy of the West

Moreover, Dower argues convincingly that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons was less about ending the war (and thus saving American lives) as is usually contended, but more about demonstrating our strength to the Soviets:

The decision makers opted [to use] the bomb essentially without warning in a manner that would shock and awe the Russians every bit as much as the Japanese – and, in the process, ideally deter them from their territorial ambitions in eastern Europe while simultaneously undercutting them in Asia.”

He even gives evidence of a rush to drop the bombs on Japan prior to their expected surrender, which was considered inevitable as soon as the Soviets entered the war against them. Thus the weapons were shipped out even before they were tested. Japan, according to sociologist Michael Sherry, was “viewed as little more than ‘a vast laboratory in destruction.’”

Hiroshima after the atomic bomb

Nevertheless, the U.S. Government felt it necessary to justify the bombs by harking back to the patriotic fervor drummed up after Pearl Harbor, and to the racism against the Japanese that had fueled the fighting against them thereafter.

U.S. racist propaganda poster during WWII about the Japanese

A similar process of racism, mendacity and deception characterized the war on Iraq, Dower avers. He begins with the failure of intelligence, or rather, the Administration’s refusal to acknowledge the intelligence. He then goes into the justification given to the American people and the rest of the world for the Iraq War, reasons which were later shown to have been false.

He also writes about the “rebuilding” process in Iraq after the war, and why it has been such a failure compared to the same process in Japan. Some of the most important reasons include that in Japan, McArthur went in with a lot of advanced planning in place, whereas in Iraq, planning was rejected in favor of what Dower calls “faith-based policy making” – i.e., the conviction that a new government would just emerge “somewhat by magic.” Moreover, although the U.S. State Department had prepared plans, they were rejected in large part because of bureaucratic turf wars between the Departments of Defense and State.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur, left, with Emperor Hirohito during the Japanese emperor's visit to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo in 1945. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS

After WWII, it was important that while the U.S. guided Japan, they made sure the Japanese themselves were part of the recovery and became self-sufficient. Laws were passed at the urging of the U.S. to provide protection from “international as well as domestic predators.” Iraq has been a different story altogether. Most reconstruction work was given over to the private sector in the U.S. (and funded by citizen tax money): much to the Iraqis’ bitter disappointment, Iraq’s “own skilled workforce was obviously deemed incapable of handling such engineering projects.” The U.S. permitted 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi firms and tax-free repatriation of all investment profits. Iraq became “a gold rush”; “a carpetbaggers’ free-for-all”; especially for Republican supporters. Outsourcing the rebuilding to private and largely American contractors resulted in “confusion, cronyism, non-transparency, and corruption that had no counterpart in Japan.”

One of many protest cartoons circulating about the privatization of Iraq rebuilding efforts

Like other policies imposed upon Iraq, these only served to create more resentment, and to facilitate recruiting for Arab terrorist organizations.

In sum, Dower accuses the U.S., particularly during the Bush years, of “racial arrogance and cultural blindness,” “historical cherry-picking” for propaganda purposes, “irrationality and groupthink” and “strategic imbecility.” But this is all part, he argues, of what he identifies as the concept of war culture. This meticulous scholar backs up his accusations with irrefutable facts from an enormous amount of documentation.

Evaluation: Dower is a first-rate historian who expresses a great deal of frustration over what he considers to have been ill-conceived strategies of the U.S. in responding to the 9/11 attacks; abuses of international law; and perversion of the historical record. This book is extremely illuminating for anyone seeking to understand what happened immediately preceding and after 9/11. It is neither dry nor dispassionate, and while some might maintain that Dower has a political agenda, I would identify his bias to be more one of anger over the taking of lives in service of a “war culture” no matter which side perpetrates these acts.

Rating: 4.5/5

Note: Quite a few photos are included in the book, which was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist.

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2011