Cultures of War

Immediately after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. media proclaimed September 11 a "day of infamy" comparable to Pearl Harbor. Cultures of War takes this analogy as a point of departure for a vivid comparative analysis of the war with Japan, the war on terror, and the war with Iraq. This pathbreaking inquiry addresses institutional failures of intelligence and imagination, the "strategic imbecility" of Japan's and America's wars of choice in 1941 and 2003, terror bombing and the targeting of civilians since World War II, "Ground Zero 1945" and "Ground Zero 2001," and the driving forces behind Pan-Asian and Pan-Islam movements. A final section compares occupied Japan and occupied Iraq in thoroughly original ways.

Including more than one hundred stunning illustrations, Cultures of War promises to be one of the most important books of this decade, a conceptual breakthrough in the ways we think about "culture" in general and "war" in particular.