Posted on 05/28/2004 9:56:59 PM PDT by Utah Girl
In a few days we'll go back to the good war. Just for a visit. We'll rerun the tape of World War II with respect, gratitude and, maybe, nostalgia.
The memorial to what we have dubbed "the greatest generation" will be dedicated on the Washington Mall on Saturday. The 60th anniversary of D-Day will be commemorated eight days later.
So we'll listen to words carved into stone monuments. Dwight David Eisenhower exhorting the D-Day troops off on "the Great Crusade." Franklin Delano Roosevelt extolling the "righteous might" of the American people.
We'll bring to these ceremonies an appreciation of a time when victory was uncertain, sacrifice was enormous and the alternative terrifying. We'll celebrate a time when GIs were indeed greeted with sweets and flowers. When American armies were truly liberators — of concentration camps. When Hitler was not a name we used all too loosely to label our enemies. And war wasn't a choice — it was thrust on us.
But I hope we also bring to these ceremonies an understanding of how the idea of a "good war" has been chiseled into our collective memory. For better and, maybe now, for worse.
What a powerful grip World War II still retains on our imagination. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the one analogy everyone made was to Pearl Harbor. In those first days when the president was at his best, he told the nation, "We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. . . . Our nation — this generation — will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future."
Only later, after the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban had morphed into a war against Iraq, did I begin to wonder about the echoes he evoked with "our mission," "our moment" and "this generation."
Bush the father flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific. His generation had acquired its gravitas and its moniker in military service. Bush the son was a boomer whose international resume was as light as a butterfly ballot. He found his calling, his generation's calling, in the War on Terror. It would be our good war.
More than once, the president has told the country, "Either you support evil or you support good. This great nation stands on the side of good."
The language of good and evil barely changed as the reasons for the war in Iraq changed. "Goodness" became our moral cover story as the mission justified by weapons of mass destruction was re-justified for liberation. For sweets and flowers.
Over the past year, our moral "stand" as the good guys became shaky and then collapsed in a photo op of abuse. When Jeremy Sivits — the soldier who took photographs of acts he should have stopped — stood before a court-martial, he said in anguish: "This is not me." In story after story, hometown folks refer to soldiers now accused of shameful crimes as either "a gentle giant," or "a prankster" or, as it was said of Lynndie England, "a human being."
Are we remembering, finally, what a "human being" can do in war? What war can do to a human being? Turn someone into "not me." Is the president who proudly proclaimed that he sees black and white, not gray, getting Baghdad dust on his lens?
Iraq is often — too often — compared to Vietnam. But those who recklessly embarked on this war skipped Vietnam with its heart of darkness and chose World War II instead as their upbeat model.
Today, we rarely use Ike's language of "crusade." It's far too loaded in a Muslim world. Nor do we use FDR's "righteous" vocabulary. But it has been harder to shake the idea of a good war loose from its moorings in our imagination.
There are atrocities in every war, although no digital cameras recorded them until now. We know or should know that war can hone a killer's hardness against humanity that may take a lifetime to soften. Would it be different, I wonder, if our World War II memorials included Hiroshima and Dresden, the human tragedies that come adhered even to victory?
The greatest generation talks less of wartime heroism than of camaraderie and scared-to-the-bones hope of survival. They share a certainty that the war itself was right. By which they mean necessary.
Maybe we should pack understanding as well as gratitude for this year's visit to our fathers' war. There are just wars and unjust wars. There are wars that are forced on us and wars we rashly choose. But there is no such thing, then or now, as a good war.
Ellen's sly sanctimony is a hit piece on Bush..and has nothing to do with honoring our WW2 heroes...
She is a disgusting partisan lefty....and I resent her even mentioning our brave armed forces..she managed to slam them, too...
Goodman (of course) is conveniently leaving out that our forces did lots of things in WWII that the left has complained about like carpetbombing German cities, nuking Japan twice, locking up Americans of Japanese descent. There were also some incidents of torture of German troops IIRC.
Yet she has the gall to take one tiny incident in which the victims faced far less humiliation than captured German and Japanese forces were subjected to and say that the entire war in Iraq is morally ambiguous. By that idiotic standard, WWII was wrong as is every single military engagement this country (or any country) has been involved in.
Wow, say the byline and stopped there. I can't believe this hack is still around.
She did bring it up...
It's like a painter who purports to follow the school of "realism" putting his most recent work on the wall and telling you it's a forest pastoral only, when you look at it, you can't help but notice he's managed to use ever color but green.
The pundits and those on the left got and continue to get this war wrong. We didn't invade Iraq in order to get the oil for Haliburton or complete the job that should've been done in Persian Gulf War I. We invaded and easily conquered Iraq for reasons which these folks "seemingly miss", which I don't believe is because they're obtuse! There were three potential countries in the Middle East which we could use to provide forward basing for the continued war on terror: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Syria probably would've been easier than Iraq and while Iran probably would've been tougher--it is/was unlike Iraq, probably more amenable to "nation-building." But in neither country did we have causus belli. That made Iraq unique. One would have to be a poor student of geography to not notice Iraq's location with regards to those other two countries. We know that our invasion has had an effect on Syria, plus a few others countries e.g. Libya and maybe if we're lucky it might forment a popular uprising in Iran and result in the overthrow of the mullahs. Not too bad for killing not two birds, but a few birds with one stone
Oops. She did. I was following Laz's model there.
It's odd, though, that she wrote the Dresden part since it destroys the entire point of the part before it. Notice at the end that she kind of falls apart trying to bash the President.
It looks like she doesn't believe the lunatic argument that this is all about oil so I don't see how she can't call this war a morally good one.
Her point is there are no good wars...that they harden men and make them capable of atrocities that takes a lifetime to overcome(slam all military)..
WW2 was an unavoidable war..which she says makes it a better war..Of course Iraq is a bad ,bad war..Bush is President.
She has the liberal mental disorder.
She just doesn't get it! This is OUR generation's WWII, and we need to answer the call like those that have come before us.
We didn't declare war on the Islamofascists. They declared war on us! Now we must fight, like the generations before us, to eliminate a terrible threat to our freedom. Frankly, we must kill them in droves until they are either eliminated or forced to give up because they know their cause is hopeless because the US is too strong to beat. There is no middle ground against an enemy who intentionally targets innocent women and children!
Even IF the liberals are right, and the war was started for the wrong reasons. IT DOESN'T MATTER! We are in it now, and we better fight to win. The last thing this generation needs is a shameful repeat of Vietnam, a war we clearly won militarily but lost on the home front.
Of course, one could easily argue that had we waited, Iraq would have been unavoidable. Some people think the same about WWII as well. The Afghanistan war could also be said to be unavoidable.
And if the standard for a war being unavoidable is an attack on one's country, then surely our war on Germany during WWI and I weren't justified since we were never attacked first in either case. By contrast, our airplanes were attacked many times by Saddam which, in and of itself, could be considered justification enough for war.
DDE and OB got more troops killed than was necessary, cause they didn't know how to fight.
The were politicians and logician, not combat warriors.
If they fought like they had a couple between them and stopped trying to keep Unc Bernie and chuckie happy, the war good have been over in august, but no, they had to go head to head and kill good people cause they didn't have a vision.
No, Ellen, but often there are GREAT things accomplished or achieved through war.
Both nations are now docile and compliant. That's a good thing.
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