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Recent
Stories
June
20, 2003
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
June
19, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
June
18, 2003
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
June
17, 2003
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
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Age Peace Foundation
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Wayne Madsen
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Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
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June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
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Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
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Samuel
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Avnery
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Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
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St. Clair
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Lee Sustar
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Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
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Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
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A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
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Dear Rudy, Let's Get Those Damned Liberals
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Vest
Bush
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The Man Who Wasn't There
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Then and Now
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June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
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June
20, 2003
Rewriting Yesterday
Bush on "Revisionist
Historians"
By GARY LEUPP
Speaking to small business owners in New Jersey
June 16, President Bush said there was no doubt that Saddam had
posed "a threat to the United States" since 1991. "This
nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there
are some who would like to rewrite history---revisionist historians
is what I like to call them. Saddam Hussein was a threat to America
and the free world in '91, in '98, in 2003."
As a revisionist historian, I believe
the president misunderstands what the term "revisionist
history" really means. He has spoken out about Holocaust
revisionism in the past, a very evil form of revisionist history
that denies there ever was a Holocaust, and perhaps that is his
sole contact with the phrase. He seems to think revisionist history
is generically bad. But there are good forms as well. All revisionist
history entails is a new interpretation of some period or topic
in the past based on a changed environment and maybe the collection
of new information. For example, certain French revisionist historians
in the 1980s began challenging the traditional view of the French
Revolution as a heroic struggle for liberty, fraternity, equality,
and instead interpreted it as the harbinger of modern totalitarianisms.
I myself specialize in Japanese history,
and study the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Western scholars of
Japan writing in the 1930s and 40s interpreted this period as
one of brutal oppression and economic stagnation. Since the 1960s,
western scholars (including revisionist myself) have depicted
it as one of social progress, cultural vibrancy, and incipient
capitalism. The earlier scholars were influenced by the fascist
character of the Japanese government in their own time; the later,
by Japan as a rapidly-growing economy wedded to the U.S. Contemporary
political conditions inevitably affect how we look at the past.
My point, again, is just to defend revisionist history in itself
as neither good nor bad but part of the intellectual process.
But back to Bush's remark. He implies
that everybody used to realize that Iraq posed a threat to the
United States, but that now the revisionists are saying that
it never did. We know, Bush tells us, that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction (which of course no one anywhere
denies, since they were discovered and destroyed by UN inspectors
from 1991-98). That's not the issue. Those Bush targets as historical
revisionists are just people who believed that by 1998 Iraq wasn't,
in fact, a threat.
The lack of any WMD discoveries to date
would indicate that those maintaining that view were right on
target. These include a host of former top government officials,
former arms inspectors, even the heads of state of all the nations
around Iraq. Bush is deriding those who contend that the war
was based on disinformation. On the defensive, he is posturing
as someone taking the high road, as he has done in condemning
Holocaust revisionism (which maybe, in his own head, he conflates
with critical discussion of his actions).
But when Bush announced in Poland that
the US had found WMDs (in the form of mobile labs for germ warfare)
he was engaging in what I like to call historical
revisionism. Up until then, the British suppliers and Iraqi military
had viewed them as facilities for the production of hydrogen
to fill weather balloons. Rather like the people denying
the Holocaust, seems he was just making the germ lab story up.
I also see revisionism in Bush's repeated denunciations of Saddam
for "attacking his neighbors," implying he thinks this
was a terrible thing. Yes, Saddam attacked two of his
six neighbors (Iran and Kuwait), and the Reagan administration,
with George Bush I as vice-president, supported the
first of these. The Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld
in 1983 to cozy up with Saddam and restore full diplomatic and
trade ties, arms sales, and sharing of military intelligence.
Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad.
The US only provided about one percent of the total military
assistance, but it provided some particularly nasty commodities.
Richard L. Armitage, a senior defense
official in 1988 (and now a deputy secretary of state), argued
that the U.S. should not let Iraq lose the war, and told Congress
there was no international law preventing a leader from using
WMDs on his own people. The senior intelligence officer at the
time, Col. Walter P. Lang, has said both D.I.A. and C.I.A. officials
"were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose"
to Iran, and "The
use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter
of deep strategic concern."
In September 1988, a Maryland company
sent 11 strains of germs---four types of anthrax---developed
at Fort Detrick for germ warfare, to Iraq. The Commerce Department
approved the sale of WMDs. This was six months after the
infamous massacre at Halabja ---the gassing of the Kurds. Perhaps
the president would like someone to revise that history.
Gary Leupp
is an an associate professor, Department of History, Tufts University
and coordinator, Asian Studies Program.
He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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