Dower Versus Bush

In yesterday's speech Bush said: "'An interesting observation, one historian put it, 'Had these erstwhile experts' — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, 'Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.'" Avi Zenilman getting the historian in question to comment:

A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.

“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”

The book is Embracing Defeat and, since as revealed in the Natalie Portman discussion, I took a class on modern Japan once, I've read the book. Were one so inclined, one could have subtitled this one "why analogies between post-war Japan and post-war Iraq are wildly inappropriate," though since it was published in 1999 that's probably not what Dower had in mind.

Comments

I can see why he's annoyed. His prewar articles are remarkably prescient.

Posted by graeme | August 24, 2007 11:00 AM

I think Dower would say that the biggest difference between post-WWII Japan and current Iraq is that Japan had been utterly destroyed by World War II. People were defeated and felt that defeat in their bones. There was no insurgency. There was a collective desire to pull themselves out of the pit they were in, even if it meat accepting foreign aid. (hence the book's title) AND the US occupation was more elaborate. AND...the relevant differences are too legion to cite. No wonder Dower is irritated.

It's nice to see that Bush, who has a degree in History from Yale, has no idea how to think in time.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 24, 2007 11:21 AM

ok, a semi-mainstream publication like the politico picked this up, but why is it that such elemental fact-checking is beyond most of our media?

Posted by howard | August 24, 2007 11:23 AM

Plus they (the emperor) actually surrendered. No one surrendered in Iraq. It would have been a lot better if we had found a couple of Iraqi generals to negotiate a formal surrender and then NOT disbanded the army.

Posted by chris | August 24, 2007 11:24 AM

this is actually hitting on one of my HUGE pet peeves, i.e. people who justify the exclusion of "experts," such as the entire state department and anyone with any experience in the region, from planning for post-iraq scenarios by digging up [dower's account of] the fact that the "old japan hands" were in many cases excluded from the ww2 postwar occupation and planning effort. i'm a big fan of dower's and to suggest an equivalence between these two events is totally misleading. the "old japan hands," as dower makes clear, were excluded because they were thought to be too close to the ruling regime, not because the notion of expertise was itself downgraded. who in the state department, i ask you, was too close to the hussein regime? no one ... it's totally nonsensical (unless you count mr. handshake donald rumsfeld). i think i already ranted on this once at ezra's place (maybe?) so apologies for the self-repeating, but i'm actually IN japan, which means of course that i'm drunk.

Posted by groobles | August 24, 2007 11:31 AM

and by "hitting on," i mean, "mentioning dower and thus giving me a chance to recycle a previous rant."

of course.

Posted by groobles | August 24, 2007 11:33 AM

I can't believe Bush had the gall to quote John Dower to support his war. I have never personally met a single person more opposed to the Iraq war than Professor Dower.

In fact, after the war started, Dower started explicitly saying in class lectures that comparing post-war Japan to post-war Iraq is entirely inappropriate and demonstrates "extreme confusion" about the historical facts of pre-war Japan and Iraq. This point was emphasized repeatedly throughout all of his classes, so much so that I though I was concentrating in comparative politics instead of East Asian Studies!

Posted by Anonymous | August 24, 2007 11:38 AM

He would probably point out that Japan had a history of democracy that, like in Germany, took a perverse right turn. When was Iraq's equivalent to Taisho democracy?

Posted by Reality Man | August 24, 2007 11:41 AM

No need to bother with probablies: here is an article he wrote before the invasion, its still quite good.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.1/dower.html

Posted by graeme | August 24, 2007 11:47 AM

Aside from all of the other really good points made above to distinguish post-war Japan from post-war Iraq, the two countries could not be more dissimilar with regard to ethnic mix and religious diversity. Japan was constituted almost entirely of one ethnic group and one religion. There were no ethnic or religious lines upon which society could cleave. Iraq, of course, is a hodgepodge of religions (Sunni, Shia and other smallwe sects) and ethnicities, (Arab, Kurd, etc).

Posted by ephus | August 24, 2007 11:58 AM