A US Marine watches as an Osprey carrying US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta arrives March 14, 2012 at Forward Operating Base Shukvani, Afghanistan[/caption]America’s public television network, sanctuary for the nation’s dwindling reserve of thinking individuals, is re-broadcasting Ken Burns’ sweeping documentary of World War II. “The War,” as the film is called, is uniquely Burns, shaped as it is by the personal reflections of men and women who saw combat or manned the homefront. Their stories animate the horror and anxiety of war better than any textbook.
Surprisingly, one sentiment that emerges from the interviews is nostalgia. Despite the slaughter and deprivation that veterans and their loved ones endured - and the footage and accounts of battle are chilling - there is a longing for the unity of purpose and communal spirit that war demands of its citizenry. This gives “The War” an ironic subtext. America’s conquest of fascism on two fronts not only established itself as an imperial power, it defined in Americans’ minds the natural way of war. Moral certainty, never questioned before the existential threat that was Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, has become an effective tool for maneuvering the nation to war. Consider elite Washington’s cavalier likening of a revolutionary like Ho Chi Minh or a minor dictator like Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, or the equivalency it draws between the fight against radical Islam and a “Third World War.”
The two most important legacies of World War II, which harmonize gravely with one another, is America’s ability to project force anywhere in the world and a belief in its own exceptionalism. The officials who engineered the country’s greatest wartime victory - men like George Marshall, Henry Stimson and Dwight Eisenhower - were too modest, understated and just plain busy to interpret their agency as divinely inspired. Since their passing, however, the myth of American exceptionalism has served as hand-maiden to misbegotten military enterprises from Asia to the Middle East. Only after those adventures collapsed with terrible effect, particularly for innocents on their business end, did Americans agitate for peace.
There is one more counterpoint to the way World War II is recalled in Burns’ epic and the way post-war America makes war: The ideal of shared sacrifice, rendered with such intimacy in “The War,” is all but neglected today, either in Washington, on Main Street, or in board rooms. Americans have effectively outsourced the waging of war in their name to a professional military that accounts for less than one half of one percent of the population. The nation’s civilian and military realms are all but segregated from each other, an estrangement that relieves the former of war’s burdens and the latter from civilian meddling in its affairs. Even the financial toll of America’s wars is underwritten by foreign creditors, to be met ultimately by future generations of its own.
This is, to say the least, a dangerous state of affairs. It is potentially disastrous for any nation to wage war lightly, particularly so for a global hegemon. Missing in the rhetorical dreck of this election year, however, is thoughtful debate about America’s responsibility as a superpower and how its imperial writ has been so thoroughly abused.
Seventy years ago, the price of failure as the US prepared for war was incalculable. Today, not only are the costs and consequences of American militarization tolerated by an insular electorate, they may be all but ignored.
