The Belief in Regenerative War: Why So Many American Intellectuals Supported the Iraq War

By Jackson Lears, History News Network, Aug 3, 2009

Mr. Lears’s latest book is: Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper, June 2009).

One of the peculiarities of modern war is the fascination it holds for intellectuals. Since the 1890s, in the United States as in Europe, the loudest yelps for blood have been heard some distance from the battlefield. Professors, journalists, ministers, and other moralists have all sung the praises of war from the safety of their studies. This is an occupational hazard, the sort of thing that happens to men (nearly always men) who live in their heads, for whom moral crusades and civilizing missions have a more palpable reality than sliced skin or burned flesh. Of course ordinary citizens are susceptible to vicarious thrills, too: as J.A. Hobson observed in his classic Imperialism (1900), “the lust of the spectator” could mobilize an entire population in the service of the modern imperial state. But people who are paid to write and think for a living are more likely to inflate the invigoration of national purpose induced by war into a justification of war itself.

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Tags: “Vietnam Syndrome”, Christopher Hitchens, imperial regeneration, intellectuals, Jackson Lears, militarists, modern war, Norman Podhoretz, policy intellectuals, U.S. military power, United States