LOOKING FOR THE GOOD WAR: AMERICAN AMNESIA AND THE VIOLENT PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS BY ELIZABETH D. SAMET
There is a great deal I like in this book.
I gained many new insights and affirmation of what I knew before:
1. The sentimentalized memorialization of the Civil War aimed at bringing White people (Unions and Confederates) together, leaving the newly freed blacks suffering the blight of Jim Crow--so well documented by Historian, David Blight.
2. Fresh for me was how the myth of the Civil War was perpetuated by films in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly the Westerns. They signaled moral equivalency for each side, failing to recognize that one side (the South) had undertaken war to preserve the enslavement of people.
3. Samet underscores the reality that “war is hell.” Soldiers enter it with a mixture of motives, by no means all noble. We have tended to glorify World War II through the work of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw and Steven Spielberg. Yet, in drawing this out, she undercuts and fails to do justice to the reality that there are some “good wars,” ones that are a necessity in the evil they seek to end.
I have long believed that there are wars of choice, wars that could have been avoided and some wars that could not. World War II is a war that couldn’t have been avoided, not unless one goes back to the antecedents for Hitler and deny his existence. I don’t think the Civil War could have been avoided either, not with the dichotomy of beliefs on slavery. The Spanish-American War was, I believe, a war of choice. So was Vietnam, in hindsight, misbegotten. And the same is true of Iraq.
You can’t read this book without thinking about the war underway right now between Russia and Ukraine, supported by the U.S. and the European Union. Was this war avoidable? Historians will study and debate this forever. I think it might have been avoided if one goes back to the decisions that might have been made at the turn of the century. While it was a narrow window, I believe there was the possibility that, with more foresight and courageous, imaginative leadership, a Pan-European security arrangement, including Russia, could have been put in place. Whether it would have lasted forever no one can know. But I think at that point in time, Putin was open to such an arrangement.
By the time we reached 2014, however, having had the expansion of NATO, including the prospective inclusion of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO and, importantly, the increasing paranoia of Putin that the West was out to surround him, with enough circumstantial evidence to prove the case, the risk of war was high. Yet, individual agency still existed, in the person of Vladimir Putin. I suspect that many other Russian leaders would have reached the same decision he did, but not all. His belief that Ukraine was part of Russia, something he came to believe in more and more, might not have driven another leader as it drove him to what I believe will be recorded as one of the worst decisions by a leader of a major country in history.
“We are where we are,” now as we tritely even if accurately say. But there is an great lesson to be learned in this for the future. Boiled down, it amounts to doing one’s best to see the world as a potential adversary sees it. We didn’t do that with Russia. We failed to consider at the turn of the century what would be in the long-term interest of the U.S., Europe, Russia and the world. We saw the world almost entirely through our lens.
Other insights:
1. Our quick 100-day victory in the first Gulf War allowed us to kick the Vietnam syndrome of having failed. Positive confidence-affirming signals returned and a sense of hubris came with them.
2. The attack of September 11, 2001 drew on analogies with Hitler which drove us to a flawed war on terrorism, which led us to the misbegotten decision to invade Iraq.
3. Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was clearly a war of "choice" from his standpoint yet a war of "necessity" for the Ukrainians and their western allies.
There is an aspect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that is especially tragic. And that is that, even as the Ukrainians rightly view themselves as an independent nation, and are fighting valiantly to protect their independence, it is also a civil war in Ukraine. Countless Russian soldiers are fighting, trying to kill men and women who are extensions of their own families. There are human dimensions here that only time will expose, even as they are being carried out in blood as I write this.
It’s hard to imagine the conflicted feelings—the horror—felt by a Russian soldier who thought he was going to Belarus for exercises and found himself invading Ukraine to kill someone who could be a friend or relative.
Many of the Shakespearian plays which Samet cites were about civil wars in England. The agony of those wars is being mirrored in Ukraine in ways that will eventually be written about in history and literature.
4. Samet refers often to my favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr. He brought a cautionary reading to history. Beware, “if virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue; if strength becomes weakness because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation; if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed upon it; if wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its limits.”
Niebuhr believed that this risk had poisoned the evolution of Communism in the 1950s. And it’s fair to say it has affected us, too, in the United States in our own history. In fact, it is endemic to human nature. Moral complacency and superiority can come to easily justify doubtful means to achieve ostensibly virtuous ends.
American innocence—the faith in the essential virtue of our society that makes any critique evidence of ill-will--is more than cautionary. It’s a warning. Yet, we must not allow this to bring us to a position of ultimate relativism. We must recognize that there are truths to be honored, nowhere better summarized than in the words of our Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.”
All of this is a reminder of what I’ve seen in the lives of everyone, including myself. We are curious compounds of good and evil. Stubborn idealism comes at a price: namely, an intolerance of complexity, compromise and ambiguity. Yet, again, we cannot allow this to leave us awash in the foggy no-man’s land of relativism.
5. Robert McNamara’s The Fog of War is worthy of comment. McNamara’s story illustrates “the slipperiness of beginnings and ends, the refusal of war to stand still long enough to be shaped into a coherent story; the ambient fog obscures causes and consequences as well as ends and means.”
5. Today, Samet asserts, we celebrate the veteran of World War II as almost an archetype of stoic humility rather than a readily identifiable individual. Samet castigates this in a way that I strongly disagree with. For there are values, even if not always present, even if sometimes simplified in their motivation, revealed by the best of what happened in World War II. The celebration of loyalty, of courage, of sacrifice, of seeking freedom over tyranny. I find the celebration of these and other values to be a good thing so long as it not romanticized and sentimentalized to the point of disguising the reality that war is hell.
6. The sentimental memorialization of the Civil War, with its invidious impact on race relations, continued well into the 20th century. In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt unveiled a statue of Robert E. Lee. His speech tapped into the popular interpretation of the Civil War and Lee. It also acclaimed Lee as not only a “great leader of men and a great General,” but also as “one of the greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.” Roosevelt’s position may have been anchored in a genuine belief, but I doubt it. It certainly was anchored in his need to get the Southern vote to win the presidency.
7. Frederick Douglass foresaw in his 1875 speech what the reconciliation for the White race through the romanticization of the Civil War meant as he plaintively asked: “When this great White race has renewed its fallacy of patriotism and float back into its accustomed channels, the question for us: In what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people? What tendencies will spring out of it?”
Let me conclude as Samet concludes with timeless words from Lincoln. She draws on his speech of 1838. Lincoln was meditating on the theme of “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” He did so, as he writes, with “a curious mixture of respect and impatience.” The respect grew from his celebrating the importance and influence of the men who had created this country. A few were still around. They may have seemed to be “giant oaks,” but they were not giants, only men. Heroes for their own time but not for all time.
“In his remarks, Lincoln respected the past without being paralyzed by it. He understood the ways in which improvement must temper veneration and reason moderate passion. He recognized that only truth could conquer the dangerous distortions of myths,” Samet eloquently writes.
And so Lincoln returns to what we find in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” “That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
That is what we were fighting for in World War II and achieved.
That is what the Ukrainians are fighting for at this moment. It is inspiring. It is not to be forgotten, not ever, and I doubt if it ever will be. However, I hope in time we will also seek to understand what led to this war and what we can draw from this understanding that might allow us to avoid a similar war in the future. This is an extremely relevant hope today in constructing a relationship with China which does not result in a competitive relationship morphing into an existential conflict that could lead to war.
