On the war path
“Japanese psychology,” wrote Joseph Grew, the United States ambassador to Japan at the outset of World War II, is “fundamentally unlike that of any Western nation.” The Japanese mentality “cannot be measured by our own standards of logic,” he added. More than 60 years later, Paul Bremer, viceroy in U.S.-occupied Iraq, assessed one of that country’s political leaders. “Ayatollah Sistani operated on a different rational plane than we Westerners,” Bremer wrote in his memoir.To MIT historian John Dower, these two comments, made in two very different settings, are nonetheless part of one historical thread: a long-running American insistence that Western civilization has a purchase on true rationality which other nations and societies do not. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, says Dower, an expert on Japan and modern warfare, the Bush administration, even more than was commonly recognized, derived its descriptions of America’s new enemies from the older...