Spring 2008

George W. Bush claimed the attacks of September 11, 2001, would transform American thinking about the world. His model was Pearl Harbor, and he and his supporters routinely summoned the analogy to muster popular support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the effect of 9/11 has faded, at least as it pertains to Iraq. The comparative quiet in that country during the past several months—combined with the mortgage debacle in this country and incipient recession—has tilted the weight of complaints against the Bush administration from the Iraq War to the economy.

The failure of 9/11 to generate the kind of lasting change in public attitudes wrought by Pearl Harbor reveals something important about the political culture of wartime America. High casualty rates aren’t the central issue. More Americans died in single days during World War II than have died altogether in Iraq. Yet support for the antifascist war never faltered. Nor did it diminish even in hindsight, when the Cold War revealed that victory over Germany and Japan hadn’t solved America’s problems after all. No other American war has had such staying power; sixty years later, the bloodiest war Americans fought against foreign foes remains, as ever, the “good war.”

To point out that the critical component here is leadership may be to repeat a cliché, but it is nonetheless true. America can be led to war with remarkable ease. But it can be kept at war—kept wholeheartedly, in the face of mounting casualties—only if the American people have been persuaded that the war bears a direct relation to their security. World War II passed the test, largely because Franklin D. Roosevelt devoted substantial effort to bracing Americans for the coming challenge. Roosevelt, in turn, had paid close attention to the experiences of two earlier wartime presidents, whose failures he observed at close range. Bush, choosing to emulate the wrong Roosevelt, has repeated nearly all of them.
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H. W. Brands is professor of history at the University of Texas. He is the author of Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times and The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream, among other books.

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