The Unexceptional War

Anne Applebaum's review of two new histories of WWII, whose insights sound eerily relevant to Al-Sadr's prominence today:

[W]e liberated one half of Europe at the cost of enslaving the other half for fifty years. We really did win the war against one genocidal dictator with the help of another. There was a happy end for us, but not for everybody. This does not make us badthere were limitations, reasons, legitimate explanations for what happened. But it does make us less exceptional. And it does make World War II less exceptional, more morally ambiguous, and thus more similar to the wars that followed.