Day By Day

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Wretchard over at Belmont Club has been looking through the recent information pouring into the public domain about the onset of the Iraq war. He sums it up this way:
As more information becomes available about the recent past it becomes necessary for revise the conventionally accepted picture of the War on Terror in the light of new revelations.... Nobody is going to be completely happy with the new information. Saddam was not as innocent of WMD intentions as many Liberals retrospectively claimed him to be. He was more brutal than anyone could imagine him to be. Administrations supporters will be unhappy to learn that Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush probably made errors in judgement in the planning and execution of OIF. But Liberals will be saddened to discover that President Bush may not have been eager to invade Iraq at all, despite portrayals to the contrary by the press, deciding only after the intelligence community (which did not entirely cover itself with glory) convinced him that Saddam was an imminent threat. We learn that press exaggerations may have helped abort the first battle of Fallujah, probably to the detriment of the American cause.

Read it here.

And that's just for starters. As I noted last week the history wars over the meaning of Iraq and the Bush presidency are beginning to heat up. What we think we know today is quite different from what we thought we knew yesterday and far from what we will think we know tomorro.w. Unfortunately, in these politically charged times few scholars will be willing to take a serious look at the emerging evidence unless it confirms their prejudices. The lines are clearly drawn and their minds are already made up. And before anyone begins to denounce "revisionism" remember the alternative to revision is plagarism.

No comments: