I've read that a quarter of our country wasn't in favor of the war. Which makes sense. My grandfather (who was a World War I veteran) told the recruiter when my dad enlisted in the Navy in 1945 that he was bringing in another young man to fight Britain's war. No bitterness there.
We forget the bitterness of the fight over our involvement in World War II:
Yet the great national commitment to victory in World War II stands out as a singular shining moment of cohesion and unity. The afterglow of that massive war effort and the Allies’ great victory hides a darker reality of the political storm that swept the nation right up to the very day of the Pearl Harbor attack.
The fight between isolationists and interventionists over America’s future role in the world, a fight that turned into a political and sometimes real brawl for the presidency in the 1940 election, proved lower and even more vicious than what passes for political discourse today.
After a bloody war in 1917-1918 (for us) that we thought ended war, and as the Great Depression lingered on, a lot of Americans were in no mood to fight a European war again.
Japan ended the debate for the Pacific theater. And Germany, already angry at our undeclared naval war against the Germans in the Atlantic, ended the debate for the European theater. How long it would have taken for us to declare war on Germany had Hitler not saved us the effort is a point of speculation for the war period.
And whether we would have had the willingness to invade Japan is a question for me, goodness and national unity notwithstanding. I recall reading that the troops being transferred from Europe to the Pacific were demoralized that after winning "their" war they had to fight another. But the atomic bomb saved us from that undertaking.
Victory in world War II--despite bringing the Soviets into central Europe and enabling Mao to win the Chinese civil war, thus sowing the seeds of two fronts in the Cold War--and time have erased the memories of those divisions. Victory also eroded the motivation of those who opposed the war to continue arguing over the war after we won.
Heck, by 2003, the 1991 Persian Gulf War that saw large opposition had morphed into a good war with a gold standard of debate and approval (despite the relatively close votes to go to war in Congress: 52-47 in the Senate and 250-183 in the House).
I'll add that divisions over confronting the Soviet Union in the Cold War have been forgotten after the collapse of Soviet communism.
In time, unless we blow the battlefield victories of Iraq and Afghanistan, those wars in Iraq and Afghansitan will be recorded as clear victories. Whether the brawls of the last decade will fade enough to make them templates in a future debate is another question. I suspect they will.
Victory makes sacrifice acceptable. Don't forget it as we have pseudo-strategic debates about "exit strategies."
