Historian: Bush use of quote 'perverse'

When making his bizarre Vietnam war analogy with the war in Iraq the other day, President Bush quoted professor John Dower and highlighted comments he made regarding Japan after WWII. The inference from Bush was that Dower believed that there was a link between those who criticised the Iraq war effort and those who opposed the democratisation of Japan.

The only problem is that Dower is on record as stating that there is no correlation between the two conflicts and he is furious that Bush has misquoted him in this way.

Bush stated:

“An interesting observation, one historian put it, ‘Had these erstwhile experts’ — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, ‘Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.’ ”

However, Dower has hit back stating:

“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.” “I have always said as a historian that the use of Japan [in arguing for the likelihood of successfully bringing democracy to Iraq] is a misuse of history,” he said when notified of the Bush quote.

Indeed, Dower has produced an article subtitled "Don't Expect Democracy in Iraq", which renders him a very strange choice of academic for Bush to quote.

Indeed, Dower went as far as to say of the democratisation of Japan:

The problem is that few if any of the ingredients that made this success possible are present—or would be present—in the case of Iraq. The lessons we can draw from the occupation of Japan all become warnings where Iraq is concerned.

A spokesman for President Bush has stated that Bush only quoted Dower in relation to his views regarding Japan, which is really pushing the bounds of plausibility as no-one who heard the speech could be in any doubt that Bush was using the analogy to further the argument that the US should remain in Iraq.

And so the war supporters are reduced to this. Using quotes from people who are on record as opposing the war and who have already dismissed publicly the very argument that Bush is attempting to espouse.

“Whoever pulled that quote out for him [Bush] is very clever,” Dower said, acknowledging that “if you listen to the experts prior to the invasion of Japan, they all said that Japan can’t become democratic.”

But there are major differences, Dower said. “I’m not being misquoted, but I’m being misrepresented.”

“In the case of Iraq,” Dower said, “the administration went in there without any of the kind of preparation, thoughtfulness, understanding of the country they were going into that did exist when we went into Japan. Even if the so-called experts said we couldn’t do it, there were years of mid-level planning and discussions before they went in. They were prepared. They laid out a very clear agenda at an early date.”

I thought at the time that the speech was an error, but to now find that it was selectively quoting people out of context really does imply that Bush is scraping the bottom of the barrel to make an cogent argument for his war.

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