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Excellent post Bruce. Back here in Kansas City we have the National World War I Museum. It's an outstanding institution, filled with up-to-date interactive displays and great introductory films. It's hard for Americans, with their cultural tendency towards historic amnesia, to get their heads around the fact that World War I was the dominant military event of the Twentieth Century and not World War II. This Museum surely helps with that.
It's impossible to understand the rise of Nazism unless you see the "they stabbed us in the back" grudge held by the returning German veterans post-World War I, a grudge so artfully exploited by Hitler and his minions. In so many ways I saw the same sort of "they stabbed us in the back in Vietnam" grudge dominate our officer corp's and media/political war hawks' rhetoric as we invaded Iraq. All the press censorship, the so-called embedding of friendly journalists and the vilifying of all war critics (foreign or domestic) was a direct echo of Germany 1939.
Our only hope to avoid a repeat post Iraq, when the full dimensions of this ill-fated adventure become known and the vets/war hawks/hacks seek out scapegoats, is to demand a full accounting of what really happened there. Actually, I am hopeful the military will spearhead such an accounting. There seems to be a growing sense amoung our professional military historians that after two "similar" misadventures (possibly three if one includes Korea), that military history must also include astute political analysis. I suspect the post-Iraq American military leadership will be far more wary of America's armchair warriors and their political/media hacks. I am hopeful such leadership will be armed with the lessons on Iraq, Vietnam, and demand more pre-invasion intelligence and political justifications.
In the meantime, concerned citizens must be vigilant, as you warn, for the distortions of "spin" perpetrated by those who led our nation into this military folly.
Keep up the good work.
Tim, I was in that museum before it was remodelled. I plan to see it on my next visit to Kansas City. I like the symbolism of the eagles in the front covering their heads. As I recall, one is supposed to be looking toward the battlefields of Europe and the other looking to the past, both covering their faces in horror at the level of the slaughter in that generally senseless and massively destructive war.
If we human being were genuinely intelligent creatures, the First World War would have been the last war.
And you're very right about the role of the stab-in-the-back myth/lie in Germany. It dealt a severe blow to the credibility of the new democracy from the start.
Thats strange I have just written an article on the lessons from the Iraq war. The one thing I think that the Neo-Cons have under-estimated about the American people is their ability to see through most of the deceptive tactics they employed to get us into the war in the first place. The near landslide.. was it a landslide or not? Reporters hesitated about using it, for some reason.
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