Back when the Iraq War was still a thing that people talked about, I wrote a [thing][t] for the school where I was working about how Iraq in 2004 was not like Japan in 1945. Now there's a new book that argues America of 2003:Iraq::Pre-war Japan:[Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere][g]. The more I think about this analogy, the better it is. The whole thing is must-read, but here's a bit from towards the end: > American historians will look back on our recent cult of “liberal hawks” as basically the equivalent of these Japanese writers [who defended the war beforehand but blamed militarists afterwards], whether it be Thomas Friedman, who advised that we “take out a very big stick” on Iraq, or Christopher Hitchens, who gleefully anticipated a “clash of civilizations” and bragged that we had bombed Afghanistan “out of the stone age”. A fair amount of worldly intelligence is no protection against the seductions of war and jingoism. Nor are these “liberal hawks” the more dignified for predictably shifting blame for the wars they provided ideological cover for—the same phenomenon occurred in Japan, where a narrow clique of militarists apparently bore all responsibility; here it is Rumsfeld, or the CIA, or whatever. In any event, the same journalists, like Jeffrey Goldberg, who led us into Iraq with spurious reporting about WMD and linkages between Saddam and al-Qaeda now churn out further propaganda rationalizing an attack against Iran, showing no compunction for indulging in such fraudulent alarmism in the past. Goldberg, of course, now claims that he is analyzing the likelihood of war rather than advocating for it. On Iraq, he admits to being wrong about WMD “like everyone else”; yet he will certainly not apologize for having “taken a stance against a genocidal fascist” like Saddam. Goldberg does, however, “regret the atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war, and its aftermath”. This is why I try to blog about torture to the degree that I can stomach it. I don't want to end up like Watsuji Tetsurō in terms of post-war guilt about complicity through silence. Via [Behold My Swarthy Face](http://twitter.com/Swarthyface/status/4871665964032000) [t]: http://deadhobosociety.carlsensei.com/index.php/Essays/ESSAY7 [g]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere [c]: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Dower Update: I got a link from the comments to [a CSPAN interview with Dower][c].
