Looking For The Good War: American Amnesia And The Violent Pursuit Of Happiness, Samet - Incomplete

          "More than seventy-five years on, World War II remembrance continues to distort the country's past... such is the...mythology... of WWII - the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones..." "In 1945, the United States was a power as dominant, its vanquished enemies as inhumane, as any the world had seen." All of our wars since then have "inherited that wars moral justification." 

             The highpoint of America's fond remembrance and idealization of the war came around the celebration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day and was led by historian Stephen Ambrose and journalist Tom Brokaw. Both men spoke of an almost universal support for the war and ignored the depths of the opposition articulated by the America Firsters, which opposition ran very deep in the midwest and mountain states. While focusing on the character of the generation, both writers paid little heed to the violence necessary to win the war. And because that violence led to a world we were enamored with, one in which we were heroic, "it leads us repeatedly to imagine that the use of force can accomplish miraculous political ends even when we have the examples of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to tell us otherwise."

           The premise of this book resonated with me, as our messianic approach to foreign policy has troubled me for decades. But once the author passed beyond the introduction, bafflement became the order of the day.