On American Jingoism

Shortly before the "shock & awe" attack on Iraq, and for months after, public support for the war was high in the US. This was reflected in the 70-80% approval rating for Bush, who had no doubt hoped that the war would turn him into a great president and American hero. Alas. But even today, many US politicians who once supported Bush but now criticize him, do so with the logic that they didn’t support this kind of war, one that would be so badly run. Bush, they say, should have sent in more troops and supplies, and planned "to win the peace". In other words, they supported an operationally smarter war. They reflect not on the idea of war itself, but on a war that America would have won.

A minority of Americans did oppose the war from the start and called these politicians irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit. But what about the other 70-80% of Americans who had also approved? Most of them even re-elected the same politicians, knowing their devious course of action. Are they any less irresponsible, ignorant, and morally complicit? 

It's not enough to argue that Americans were lied to about Saddam's nukes and his links to al-Qaeda. With the exact same "evidence", why did Americans support the war, when much of the rest of the world opposed it? Why was the threshold for using the military option so low in the US? Aren't the same people now receptive to the saber-rattling against Iran (including casual threats of obliteration)?

What is it that makes Americans, and hence their politicians, so jingoistic? This jingoism, combined with US military might, Rapture-ready evangelical visions, and the widespread American ignorance about the cultural complexities of much older societies, is today a blight upon the world. In Iraq alone, it has helped kill perhaps a million people and turn millions more into refugees, creating the "most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948".

In the excerpt below, professor Tony Judt offers a compelling explanation for why "the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military":

Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat. Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key. And why not? For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option—on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.

More here.