The comic was titled "The Good War: How America’s infatuation with World War II has eroded our conscience"
https://thenib.com/the-good-war
Basically, it was about how America's nostalgia for national unity of World War 2 (or at least how it was presented in history books, documentaries and more) influenced America's reaction to 9/11.
The comic pointed out that in the 1990's, there was some of the nostalgia presented in the very popular movie "Saving Private Ryan" (directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks), and the very popular book "The Greatest Generation" (written by then NBC newscaster Tom Brokaw).
World War 2 was presented as a noble cause for the USA, as we fought Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
World War 2 was presented as a time of national unity, in contrast to the public reaction to the Vietnam War.
World War 2 was presented as a time when the USA wins a major war on two fronts in contrast to the Vietnam War where the US troops were getting outsmarted by the enemy's guerrilla warfare tactics.
Obviously, World War 2 and Vietnam War were two very different situations.
At the start of World War 2, many US Americans were reluctant to get into another European war. "America First" was the major slogan for those who felt the USA should stay out of foreign affairs. Those who felt that way were called "isolationists".
Then the Pearl Harbor attacks happened. This was war. Much of the isolationist mentality melted after that fateful day.
Contrast that to the Vietnam War, where the Vietnamese communist didn't pose a threat to the United States. So why did we have to get involved?
Also, the Vietnam War came at a time where people questioned America's position as the moral high standard.
After World War 2, many African-American soldiers came back home to a land where they didn't have the freedoms that they were supposedly fighting for. They put their lives on the line for a country that didn't treat them equally. All that for nothing.
The 1950s was when the civil rights movement gained major momentum, where people questioned America's position as the moral high standard.
So the question became "why fight for freedom in Vietnam when we can't even have freedom here?". Or as Muhammad Ali famously said, "No Vietnamese ever called me a n----r".
Also, the post-World War 2 era was an era where many non-white countries fought to be independent of their European overlords. It was no longer a world dominated by European powers.
The Vietnamese already fought off the Japanese invaders in WW2 and fought off the French who wanted to be their overlords again. The compromise solution after Vietnamese independence was that North Vietnam was to be Russia's puppet, and South Vietnam was to be USA's puppet. The North & South got into a war. The Russians just provided funds and weapons. But the USA brought in troops, making them the latest colonizers telling them what to do.
North Vietnam's government was strong under the dictator Ho Chi Minh, South Vietnam's government was weak with constant coups and disorganization. This made it easy for the communists to infiltrate the South.
The USA was basically propping up an ineffective government and using drafted troops to fight for a war in which they had no real motivation to fight.
In World War 2, millions of young men (even teenagers who lied about their age) signed up to get revenge for the Pearl Harbor attacks.
None of that motivation existed for US Americans to fight over who should be the dictator for all of Vietnam.
So it was young men drafted against their will to fight in the jungles for a cause they didn't understand, against an enemy that knew the jungle terrain from childhood.
Japan and Germany had an industrial machine and a conformist society. But they didn't have jungles where the enemy could hide and launch guerrilla attacks.
Add to that, TV news (which wasn't widely accessible to the general public in World War 2) showcased the latest bloodbath faced by US soldiers in Vietnam.
So by 1968, many Americans wanted out of Vietnam, but the USA political leaders didn't want to look like wusses running away from a fight.
By the 1970s, the US troops withdrew from Vietnam. The attitude was "if the communist took over Vietnam, that's their problem."
Meanwhile, some of the returning US troops who fought in Vietnam felt betrayed by much of US American society. They felt that they put their lives on the line for the US, seen their friends die in battle, experienced physical and psychological injuries, and then to come home and not feel respected.
The wounds of the Vietnam War lasted a long time in US American society.
To add insult to injury, the Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, and the Islamic Fascists took over Iran, overthrew the US-supported dictator, and held hostages at the US embassy. There was a failed rescue attempt that made the USA look weak.
In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan came to power. He wanted to restore American strength but knew that sending a massive amount of troops to overseas battles just wasn't going to fly with the general public. He sent a small amount of troops to the small island of Grenada to remove communists taking US hostages. He sent a few troops to Lebanon but left after their barracks got bombed.
Meanwhile, he boosted the military budget, started a missile defense system, told the Soviet president to tear down the wall, and used warplanes to bomb Lybia. He also supported any dictator that was an enemy to Soviet-supported dictators. According to Reagan, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This had him supporting repressive regimes in Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
One of those regimes was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Iraq was at war with Iran, and Reagan sided with Iraq just to support anyone fighting against the Iranian regime that held hostages. At the same time, Reagan's government was selling weapons to the same Iranian regime that he was supposedly against so that he could get funds to indirectly support the anti-communists fighting in Central America.
Getting confused? I don't blame you!
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had a new leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who wanted to end the imperialist ambitions of his nation and withdrew troops from Afghanistan and all the Eastern European nations under Soviet control. Berlin Wall came down and Germany reunited, this time as a peaceful nation. Other Eastern European countries became newly independent, bringing the Cold War to an end.
As historian Francis Fukuyama said, it was an "end to history". The good guys won.
But wait a minute, not so fast!
While the Soviet Union no longer existed and Russia lost its imperial ambitions, the US had new enemies on the horizon.
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 without realizing that the US would now turn against him. USA president George HW Bush led a coalition to expel Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.
The USA troops won a war overseas. We are tough again.
But some people wanted more. Saddam Hussein has been presented to the public as a menacing dictator (which he was), and people started to ask "why not invade Iraq and get rid of him once and for all?"
That would have to wait. George HW Bush didn't want to risk another Vietnam quagmire, he just wanted to save Kuwait. But Saddam Hussein was furious! He wanted revenge against Bush and America. There were now worries that he was supporting terrorists against the USA
There were already other terrorist groups in the Middle East who wanted revenge against the USA for supporting the Israeli government. The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was notorious for taking hostages and killing children. Their leader Yassir Arafat later moderated his stance and wanted peace with Israel. Other Palestinians felt betrayed by Arafat and started a new terrorist organization the Hamas which sponsored suicide bombings.
Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan, the Islamic fighters (who included the Taliban and Al Qaida) who took US money and weapons to expel the Soviets have since turned against the USA. They felt the US was the next imperial power to get rid of.
The 90's were also a time when the US intervened as peacekeepers in Somalia & Bosnia. These were small-scale interventions compared to Vietnam.
The 90's were also a time when the US intervened as peacekeepers in Somalia & Bosnia. These were small-scale interventions compared to Vietnam.
While that was all going on in the 1990s, most of the USA's general public felt that those foreign terrorist were just small-time nuisances compared to what the USA had dealt with in World War 2. The 1990s were a time when the crime rate was declining and the economy was booming. We were the leaders of the new internet age. We were the world's last remaining superpower.
Movies, books, and documentaries about World War 2 were a way to remember our grandfather's generation, but they were also seen as a reminder of US strength. If we can defeat two industrial powers on two continents, then fighting a smaller group of terrorists shouldn't be that hard.
Well, that theory got put to a test on 9/11.
For a nation that was feasting on World War 2 nostalgia, it was like Pearl Harbor all over again.
This was no longer Vietnam War. The Vietnamese communist didn't attack us. But Al Quaida did. The days of being reluctant to fight overseas is now officially over!
Even the usually pacifist liberals were supporting the US fight against Al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.
People were quickly reminded that the Taliban were religious fanatics that made US fundamentalist Christians look tame in comparison.
It was really ridiculous to claim that the Taliban were fellow travelers out to fight the Western imperial forces in solidarity with all the world's oppressed. The Taliban were just a different group of oppressors.
It was easy to make the USA fight on the War on Terror to be a war of "good vs evil".
Also, we were more careful to not repeat some of our mistakes from World War 2. Whereas Japanese-Americans were forced into prison camps during World War 2, this time, our president warned against anti-Arab racism and never singled out an ethnic group to be placed into prison camps.
Sadly, there were hate crimes against those of (or perceived to be of) Middle Eastern ancestry. But the fact that there now wasn't an executive order to officially discriminate and imprison entire ethnic groups was seen as an improvement.
-------
However, Saddam Hussein (who was guilty of many things, but had nothing to do with the 9/ll attacks) was still seen as a threat!
Hey, if the USA could get rid of Hitler and also bomb Japan into submission, we can get rid of Saddam Hussein. Plus, Iraq is mostly desert, no jungles to hide in (like Vietnam), no large mountains to hide in (like Afghanistan).
However, Iraq wasn't the homogeneous, conformist societies like Japan and Germany. Societies like Germany and Japan were easy to control. Those societies don't really put much resistance against charismatic tyrants, nor do they really put much resistance against the US taking over control
Iraq didn't have a homogeneous, conformist population. While most US American can't tell the different Iraqi cultural groups apart, that doesn't mean their divisions aren't real. The main groups (Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds) had long-standing grudges against each other. Saddam Hussein favored the Sunnis and ruled over the other groups with an iron fist. If Saddam Hussein fell, there would be a battle over who has control. That's exactly what happened. There was an extremely brutal civil war between the different groups.
It took forever for the US troops to take control and calm down the situation, with the 2006 surge. By then it was too late. Thousands already died!
Meanwhile, the US troops later withdrew from Iraq in 2011. ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq & Syria,) a group of disgruntled Sunnis, saw a power vacuum and took advantage. They started their own reign of terror.
Donald Trump (a person with a long history of promising totally opposite things) promised to get the US out of foreign wars, and yet said he's going to "bomb the s--- out of ISIS". He did send warplanes to bomb ISIS bases, but I think he knows that sending army troops could mean the end of his political career if they don't have instant victories. I think Donald Trump would be more like Reagan and less like Bush Jr., and just rely on warplanes instead of land troops for future wars.
I think that even with a belligerent-talking wannabe tough-guy president like Donald Trump, that USA is pretty much done with sending land troops overseas. We already have seen the results from the Iraq war. The days were the US can fight land wars over two continents against two major industrial powers are over. The world has changed.
Donald Trump will continue to talk tough about Iran, North Korea, and China, but I doubt he would ever get support for a land war against them. He would have to rely on warplanes if worse comes to worse. China & North Korea got nukes so Trump will have to tread carefully.
