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Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. By Susan A. Brewer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. x, 342 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-019-538135-1.)
Elmer Davis, the cbs news commentator who headed the Office of War Information (owi) during World War II, promised to pursue a "strategy of truth." But in 1917 Senator Hiram Johnson of California had famously warned, "the first casualty when war comes is truth." Susan A. Brewer measures official propaganda - from the Spanish-American War to the Iraq War - against American war aims. It is perhaps not surprising that she finds significant discrepancies between propaganda and what she believes to be the real reasons America fights. She concludes: "As long as propaganda assumes that people cannot handle the...