The Bad War?
At Townhall, raisin farmer and military historian Victor Davis Hanson discusses a current revisionist trend towards blaming the Second World War on “the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans”:
In the luxury of some 60 years of postwar peace and affluence — and perhaps in anger over the current Iraq war — Buchanan and Baker and other revisionists engage in a common sort of Western second-guessing. The result is that they always demand liberal democracies be not just better and smarter than their adversaries, but almost superhuman in their perfection.
Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany and thus an understandable pretext for the rise of the Nazis, who played on German anger and fear.
Those accords may have been flawed, but they were far better than what Germany itself had offered France in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, or Russia after its collapse in 1917 — or what it had planned for Britain and France had it won the First World War. What ultimately led to World War II was neither Allied meanness to Germany between the two wars nor an unwillingness to understand the Nazis’ pain and anguish.
The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. That way, the Allies would have demonstrated to the German people that their army was never “stabbed in the back” at home, as the Nazis later alleged, but instead defeated by an Allied army that was willing to stay on to foster German constitutional government and its reintegration within Europe. The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II — and 60 years without war have followed.
[Bold mine]
Yes, of course you should read the whole thing, but that’s the part I want to talk about.
Germany — and Japan, for that matter — are very much not American imperial possessions. We count both as allies, but they run their own politics and their own economies for their benefit, not ours. Both have been powerful industrial competitors. Although both often find the American presence uncomfortable, neither seriously wants us to leave, because we provide them with potent military protection against the communist incarnations of their traditional enemies, Russia for the Germans, and China for the Japanese.
This is what needs to happen in Iraq and Afghanistan. We threw out the dictators. We are now stamping out resistance from would-be theocratic oppressors, largely foreign provocateurs. We are training their military, their police, and their politicians to something like our standards of skill, discipline, and honesty, in service to the whole country rather than the dominant tribes. We are also rebuilding huge chunks of infrastructure, water, power, roads, schools, and the like, often in the face of repeated sabotage and destruction on the part of terrorists.
When we are done, our presence can be substantially reduced, but we will have to maintain a presence there for decades. We’re overcoming decades of brutal dictatorship and centuries of medieval theocracy; that will not happen overnight. Further, Iraq is surrounded by the enemies of, not only Iraq itself, but of liberty and modernity.
If we pull out now, all the lives and treasure we have invested in Iraq will be wasted. All the trust and confidence we have asked the Iranian people to place in us will be betrayed. Indeed, we’ve already done that once, and look where it got us.
Our presence there is not an imperial one. We are not there to steal their oil, or create a captive market. We seek instead to raise up yet another country who can compete with us on our own terms.
Tags: German, Iraq, Iraq war, Japan, Victor Davis Hanson, World War II