everybody lies, unknowingly

So I am spending the weekend preparing class lectures. Needless to say, this involves a lot of research. For the final class, I want to talk about the post-9\11 world. Terrorists, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, topics along those lines. I want to to this because the students are too young to remember the Cold War, or the Iranian Revolution, or Reagan and the fall of the Soviet empire, but they almost certainly will remember 9\11 and the wars of the last ten years. Living history and all that.

Except, here’s the thing: it is extremely difficult to find sources about the Iraq War that are not biased in some way, some times heavily. Like, either the United States, led by Christian theocrats, launched a racist invasion of innocent brown-skinned peoples to seize their oil, or the United States, standing alone against the threat of Islamic fascism, boldly took action to defend itself and the world against terrorism. Either George W. Bush will be vindicated by history as another Harry Truman, or he’s the reincarnation of Hitler.

Apparently, in the 21st century, no one gets fifteen minutes of fame, but everyone gets compared to Hitler for fifteen minutes.

Even the sources that purport to be objective are rarely very good. Like, depending upon their ideological bias, they’ll throw in a sly dig at Bush, or at John Kerry, or at the missing WMDs, or at the Westerners who traveled to Iraq to act as human shields in 2003.

Except either view is nothing more than an opinion. The United States has invaded a lot of countries and overthrown quite a few governments in its time (the Philippines, Panama, Cuba, Iran, most of Central America), and most of the participants had a variety of reasons. Some thought they did it to spread democracy, or to stop the Communists. Some simply did it to get rich, or to gain access to resources. Some did it to bring civilization and better government to the natives, or to advance their own standings at home. Some did it for all of those reasons at once. And perhaps all those reasons are true, in that at least some people believed in them.

Good history needs to be cold-blooded. Objective. To weigh evidence without bias. Sometime after the Chinese communists took command of mainland China in 1949, the Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai was asked his opinion on the French Revolution, which began in 1789. Zhou responded that it was too soon to tell. So it is too soon to tell about the Iraq War – or, at least, it is too soon for people to discuss it in cold blood, without the passions and emotions of political alignment and political ideology clouding the issue.

So, in the unlikely event I’m still teaching (or am even still alive) in thirty or forty years, maybe then we’ll have some properly neutral sources on the Iraq War, sources, that can objectively weight the pros and cons, that can consider the motivations of the politicians and military leaders involved without comparing everyone involved to Hitler.

On the other hand, I consider the students, and realize that most of them would have been no more than nine or ten years old when 9\11 happened. A couple of them might have been no more than eight years old.

Man oh man, I’m getting old. Talk about living history.

-JM