Giving Revisionists a Bad Name

KEY QUOTES:

"The issue here is not that President Bush has an inadequate appreciation of the historian's craft. It is, rather, that the president and his advisers want to promulgate an official version of history and to deride as untrustworthy any challenges to their account. This is not unusual: Participants in historical events always have a stake in the way the story gets told, and they are quick to usher their versions into the spotlight."

"If, in fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq this winter, and if, in fact, there were few ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, our interpretation of this most recent war and why we got into it must inevitably be reshaped. It is far too soon to tell how this war will look to historians in future generations, but getting as close to the truth now as we can is a matter of no small importance -- particularly as we face the prospect of a prolonged and costly occupation."

"It is understandable that the president and his advisers are unhappy with criticism of their conduct of the war. But revisionist histories -- multiple, competing, conflicting accounts of important events -- ought not be treated as suspect; they are instead expressions of intellectual and political life in a democracy. The suppression of revisionist history has generally been a mark of dictatorships -- from Hitler to Stalin to Saddam Hussein himself. Or have we forgotten that?"