A Change in Direction

Bush and Cheney have been striking out at the "irresponsible" "rewriting of history" by the critics of the Iraq War. However, one of their Democratic supporters, has stated that the time has come to leave Iraq:

An influential House Democrat who voted for the Iraq war called Thursday for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, another sign of growing unease in Congress about the conflict.

"It is time for a change in direction," said Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats. "Our military is suffering, the future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region."

Murtha estimated that all U.S. troops could be pulled out within six months. A decorated Vietnam veteran, he choked back tears during his remarks to reporters.

Murtha is no light-hearted man- he's a good, thoughtful congressman, and his decision should be mulled with reverance. He has come [later than many of us] to see that Iraq is going nowhere fast, and that it is only providing constant duress with no benefits for anybody involved. It's a tough thing to realize when he'd staked so much belief in it- but his reframed conceptualization is not the result of revisionist anti-war critics: it's the result of his own deliberation over the unimproved state of Iraq.

Cheney and Bush have begun this process of chiding "war critics" for their revisionism, for "forgetting" what they voted for, and for misleading the population- after all, they saw the same intelligence that The Administration saw; and they voted to take action and support the President!

In Frederich Nietzsche's "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" he argues that the various attempts at manipulating history unduly actually, literally, lead to the smothering of knowledge, and of life itself. That history itself can be an agent of great change and information or great stifling power. Many things are to be attributed to this including attempting to study an "objective, scientific" history or manipulating the various forms of history negatively.

There's certainly a lot of specifics in Nietzsche's work to deal with, and not all apply here. But One thing that The Administration are literally attempting to do, by co-opting the language of "revisionism" and equating it with the same negative power as "activist" [as in "activist judges"] is just what Nietzshe laments- except, intentionally. Their goal is to remove any possible inquiry into the historical circumstances of the Invasion of Iraq. They disallowed any engagement with the intelligence at the time, manipulated the intelligence, and then claim that those who have come out to critcize them are "revising" the historical record.

The revision is, clearly, being done by The Administration, but this is much more dangerous than simple defense- the goal is annihilation of the historical debate and record, for the pure sake of admonishing a couple political critics. Good work, guys. Always on top.