Even though I’m a pacifist (and some day I might tell you why), I recognize the great human qualities often exhibited by people who go to war: courage, self-discipline, a desire to make the world a better place…
Of course, those qualities can also be exhibited by pacifists. But arguing that point is not my purpose here. I just want to note that, in my view, what made the World War 2 generation the “greatest generation” as it is called was the vision and real leadership shown by the decisionmakers at that time in the crucial project of fashioning the post-war peace: qualities that are notably absent from the decisionmakers in our own sad era.
There were two key aspects of that peace-building project that I want to note: (1) how seriously the British and their Allies took it, from the very early days of the war, and (2) how it was consciously designed to be unlike the highly punitive settlement of 1919, a settlement that had brought the world only Adolph Hitler and another, even more horrifying round of global war.
How seriously they took it.
My father, James Cobban, was not a high decisionmaker. He was a 29-year-old schoolmaster in London when the British were drawn into the war. He signed up almost immediately, and was assigned to an administrative branch of the Intelligence Corps. (M.I. 1-X, to be precise.) From the days of the blitz of London, people in the Intel Corps were already laying plans for their “future” occupation of Germany. That took courage and guts. It also took vision.
A little later, my father was involved in planning beach organization for D-Day. But once that was done, back they went to planning for the occupation of Germany. No-one would have dreamed of throwing their many meticulous plans into the trashcan.
Unlike W’s lot.
Not a punitive peace
By the time ruling occupied Germany became a reality, it was Washington that was calling the shots much more than London. And in Washington, thank God, the internal “battle” over how the Germans should be treated after the Allied victory was won out by “Col.” Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, rather than Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Secretary of the Treasure, who had urged an extremely punitive peace.
As Brad Smith, a prime historian of Washington’s war-era decisionmaking, has noted, Stimson and most of the people around him were keenly aware how dangerous and damaging the post-WW-1 settlement had been, and how badly that punitive aspect of it had damaged the prospects of stability in Europe and the world over the decades that followed 1919.
So instead of punishing the entire German people, which is what the post-WW-1 settlement had ended up doing–and which had been one of the main factors leading to the rise of Nazism–what Stimson successfully advocated instead was a much more rehabilitative project towards German society as a whole, with the “punitive” parts of the policy focused very tightly on a relatively small circle of Nazi-era wrongdoers.
In fact, the Nuremberg Trials, which tried 22 or 23 top Nazi leaders in the first round, should be viewed as a triumph of the restraint of prosecutorialism, rather than–as it is commonly depicted today–a triumph of prosecutorialism itself.
Of course, the fact that by 1948 or so, the Cold War against the Soviets had become a major factor in US strategic planning only added to the impetus to rehabilitate the western-controlled portions of Germany as fast as possible. So you could say the “rehabilitation approach” wasn’t entirely driven by noble motives…
But regardless of the mix of motives behind it, it proved to be a policy with remarkably successful outcomes. Primarily, a definitive end to the armed Franco-German contests for control over the continental heartland that hadplagued Europe for several centuries up until then. And more than just that. Once the ever-skeptical and still wounded French had gotten over some of their understandable hurts from the war years, they generated some remarkably prescient and courageous leaders and thinkers who worked with German counterparts to lay the basis for a joint project for long-term European unity. Thank God they did…
And then, there are W’s lot…
Well, I guess you get my drift. My Dad died just over five years ago. One of his best friends during the war effort, a U.S. Army counterpart called Richard Van Wagenen, with whom he worked closely in occupied Berlin, died last year. They were members of a great generation, in that they truly bequeathed to our generation a better, less war-plagued world.
And our generation?
I guess I have to admit I’m a member of the same generation as W. What are we bequeathing to our kids and (future) grandkids? How much time do we have left to turn things around– or at least, a more modest goal, to clean up some of the terrible messes our generation has made around the world?
Hitler went to war to redress Germany’s national humiliation and dominate the world. Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle/Rumsfeld/Feith went to war to establish hemegony and unfettered dominion over the world. Iraq was to be a warning to the world. Not only did it say, “Don’t Tread on Me” it declared, “Might makes right, and I can do anything I damned please and treaties, conventions, respect and decency be damned”!
Perhaps on a less gloomy note, Dubya and his handlers are doing a good job discrediting their own actions.
I agree wholeheartedly with the original premise, though. The post-WWII settlements (with Japan, too) were a triumph of *enlightened* self-interest.
WWII and its post-war planning produced the obvious conditions of stability, both social and economic, in Europe and Japan. The destructive wars that had their origin in European competition for empire reached their end. Through the Marshall Plan, the economies of Europe & Japan recovered, and, in fact, became world class in their productivity and efficiency, enabling the social democracies established in Western Europe and in some degree Japan.
One must be careful though in lauding the elite and planners of this “great generation” as we consider the colonial systems imposed and wars fought by the bigoted elite of rehabilitated Europe and the US.
The same Truman administration that laid initiated the recovery plan for Europe authored the doctrine and accepted the resolutions approving the overthrow of popular and democratically elected governments outside of Western Europe and the US. This was done all in the name of Cold War “containment.” It was expressed in the crusading declaration National Security Council document 68 that specified the purpose of US foreign policy to be halting “Soviet expansion” through the massive militarization of American economy and society. But it resulted in profound misery and years of poor goverance for millions of people across the world. The two prime cases for the practice of the Truman Doctrine were Greece and Iran. The US supported the overthrow of a leftist government in Greece by arming former Nazis who, in the words of an old man recollecting the post war years, “lead us into hiding in the fields for weeks at a time, without food, for fear of getting gunned by their weapons.” Iran saw a similar fate with the CIA expulsion of Mossadeq, though the Western orientalists saw it more fit to restore the Pahlavi dynasty, with its prententious and paranoid Reza Shah, to govern the persians (who like the Arabs, official Washington believes, can only be governed by a strong man monarch with tribal connections).
France launched colonial wars in Algeria and Indochina that, over the next two decades, would lead to slaughter of a sizeable portion of each nation’s population.
France also became the main supplier of arms to Israel as it began its ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the late 1940s and 50s. Britain joined France in the invasion of the Suez Canal in 1956, the last hurrah for Anglo-French empire in the eastern Arab world. When their presence ended, the US stepped up its direct presence in the region, sending Marines to Lebanon, Jordan, and the Gulf over the next decade. The Truman Doctrine of supporting puppet rulers evolved into the Eisenhower Doctrine of direct intervention in the Middle East when the Arabs cut the string of the puppets.
As the “great generation” plotted its takeover of Middle East oil and strategic routes, a new group of crusading liberal militants in America and Britain left their cribs and assumed major advisory positions not only in think tanks and major media, but in the administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. The “neo-conservatives” built upon the imperial strategy of the “great generation,” but reset the strategy among one major premise: That the continuous, and unrestrained use of force is the best and only means to destroy popular movements for independence from colonialism, whether they are “Soviet proxies” (The Cold War terminology for national liberation movements) or “terrorists” (The post-detente terminology for these movements). Allied with right-wing American cold warriors and bigots, military contractors, and industrialists who profit from war generally, the neo-cons have shifted American public sentiment toward war from one of being mildly pacifistic (following the carnage in Vietnam and world war II) to at the very least tolerant of crusading ventures to destroy “in pre-emption threats that have not yet materalized.” The neo-cons have resurrected stereotypes and polemics about the Arab and Muslim peoples that date to the scholastic middle ages. They have inspired fear in the American population to the degree that the latter acquiesce in foolish ventures allegedly launched to guarantee their security. In the process, neo-cons such as Cheney, Pearle, Michael Ledeen, and Wolfowitz gain wealth and prestige over the initiation and transaction of wars.
Their history, like the Iraq imbroglio, is oozing with disasters of their own make. These same self-serving war mongers supported Ariel Sharon’s genocidal invasion of Lebanon. The invasion weakened the PLO but gave inspiration to the first effective manifestation of “political Islam” in the MIddle East, Hezballah. Reagan, whose Pentagon, appointments, and Cabinet included Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearle, Ledeen (the Iran contra broker), and other neo-con Likudniks, supported the Taliban and Bin Laden in his attempt to bring the Soviets “their Vietnam.” This policy backfired in the 1990s and sank in 2001 when the American bombing of Iraq and occupation of Saudi Arabia led Bin Laden and other CIA consorts to form Al-Qaeda (The first Gulf War was partially a creature of neo-con intellectuals. Charles Krauthammer, AM Rosenthal, and George Will created and disseminated the “Saddam is Hitler” metaphor, evoking alongside the political comparison every
bigoted caricature of the maurading Arab, as personified in Saddam.) And in these cases, it was neo-con Likudnik/Cold Warrior greed and arrogance that inhibited the Americans and Israelis from negotiating peaceful resolutions with their adversaries (as Ms. Cobban and others such as Rashid Khalidi and Noam Chomsky have exposed).
Like the “great generation,” the neo-cons refuse to compromise with the adversary. Truman could have avoided the entire Korean War and settled for stalemate after many dead. Ditto for the US and France in Vietnam. Now, Bush refuses to withdraw from Iraq, at the behest of his neo-con Likudnik brain and his Southern Evangelical pocketbook. Rather than negotiate a just settlement with the Iraqi resistance, or, on a greater scope, with the Palestinian National Movement, or with the pan-Islamic political and military groups, Bush keeps dropping bombs and humilitating people.
The problem with this political autism, though, is that, unlike Vietnam and Korea, political Islam is willing and able to strike at the US and the West at any place and at any time. It is time to discard the post-war paradigm that American power can influence any political situation in the world. The next 9-11 could be a lot more gruesome in its humanitarian consequences.
I would add to Caise Hassan’s comments that the Greatest Generation (US branch) was pretty spectacularly unsuccessful in stablilizing East and South East Asia. I have no notion of what would have worked, but the battle for control of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as the prewar Japanese visualized it, racked up huge casualties, both in wars and in genocidal purges.
In the current situation, I fear that the US has wasted entirely the resources that it might have had in 2000 to put to useful purposes, at home and abroad. I fear that the vast debt created by the current administration, the bitterness engendered by the defeat in Iraq, and finally the paranoid efforts to reduce contact between the US and the rest of the world (seen in the reluctance of foreign students to brave new restrictions) will doom the USA to long-term decline.
Granted the September 11 attacks were a horrible shock, but so was Pearl Harbor, and American life was not poisoned by PH or WW II
It was such a promising place such a short time ago!
Ooops, I forgot about the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
Even bigger oops… China.
Few of the WWII vets still around were anything more than very young people when the war occured. They had little life experience, and their memories are greatly colored by nostalgia. The more mature war vets are no longer around to counsel us on the perils of hubris. My Dad saw many seamy things in the Navy and what he saw in post ’45 Japan was very rough and tumble. Our success in “nation building” was driven more by material and outside factors than by any genius or high purpose.
The defeated Germans and Japanese loathed their occupiers as much as the Iraqis today. Neither generals Clay nor MacArthur were any brighter or more informed than Bremmer, S
Actually John, the German and Japanese occupations were far better planned and implemented than anything done in Iraq, and were done with far more massive force. By V-E Day the US had over 1.6 million troops occupying the US sector of Germany which had an estimated population of 16 million. The British had a similar number and the Russians had a far larger occupation force in the east. The size of the Japanese occupation force was over 500,000.
While I grant you that the Germans and Japanese faced the stark chose of chosing sides in a bi-polar world, that doesn’t negate the fact that the US military did an incredibly thorough job in both countries. In Iraq what have we done? Sent in the young republicans to wing it according recent reports.
There are quite interesting histories of both occupations at the Army’s War College web site.
Of course the civilian leadership of this country is largely to blame. This does not appear to have been a war that the military asked for.
“Neither generals Clay nor MacArthur were any brighter or more informed than Bremmer, S
On ignorance among policy-makers in Washington
I teach a year-long undergraduate course on the History of Islamic Civilization. I can’t claim any great expertise, and I know no more Arabic than Paul Bremer, but I would expect students who pass my course to have enough background knowledge to understand why many of the occupation policies are counterproductive.