“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
JUDGING BY THE rhetorical battle over the putative lessons of history during the run-up to the war in Iraq, George Orwell’s famous dictum resonates today more than ever. If President Bush manages to convince the world that the war was necessary to avoid even worse consequences, a repeat of the disastrous appeasement polices of the 1930s that only encouraged Hitler, then he can emerge morally vindicated. But if the critics can keep much of the world convinced that this is a case, like Vietnam, of American imperial overreach, it will be a public-relations nightmare. A lot—an awful lot—depends on which historical analogy gains popular acceptance.
History can be interpreted, or misinterpreted, as governments and others see fit. There are no perfect historical analogies; each situation is different and has to be judged on its own merits. That said, history is the only guide we have to the possible consequences of our actions, and it deserves careful scrutiny, both in terms of what happened in the past and what might have happened differently. It doesn’t provide a road map, to borrow a term from the Mideast discussion, but it can help. And it’s always a mistake to dismiss the debate over history as a purely intellectual exercise. The implications are practical and sometimes immediate.
The most frequently invoked analogy involves Saddam Hussein and Hitler or Stalin. In its crudest form, it equates the three leaders—and that is simply wrong. Although Saddam relied on wholesale terror and killing to maintain power, there’s a fundamental disproportion of scale here. It in no way whitewashes Saddam’s bloody record to point out that he’s not in the same league as the other two. To do otherwise risks trivializing the horrors inflicted by the worst monsters of the last century.
But if that’s understood, there are legitimate grounds for drawing conclusions from the rise of Hitler in particular. Bush administration officials have argued that inaction on Iraq would have been more catastrophic than the war. While they emphasize the 1930s, others point to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which no one intervened. Writing in The Washington Post on the eve of the current war, Richard Sezibera, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United States, urged the international community “to learn from its mistakes” by recognizing that waiting in such cases is an abdication of responsibility. The new film “Tears of the Sun,” ostensibly set in Nigeria but with a Rwandan-like plot, imagines a group of American commandos stepping in to stop ethnic slaughter. A Hollywood version of what might have been, it ends with the sobering admonition from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
If the greatest danger may be doing nothing, does that mean pre-emptive action is justified? In retrospect, any reasonable person would say that pre-emptive action against Hitler, either by fellow Germans or Western countries, would have been a blessing. One of the reasons my recently published novel, “Last Stop Vienna,” offers a “what if” history of Hitler in the 1920s is to suggest that he could have been—and almost was—stopped on any number of occasions before seizing power. But since this was a time when much of the world hadn’t begun to recognize the danger Hitler represented, such an act wouldn’t have been recognized as the history-changing event it would have been. Truly effective pre-emption is rarely appreciated.
But misguided action can be dangerous as well. Graham Greene’s powerful novel “The Quiet American,” now made into a less convincing movie, is still one of the best portrayals of the arrogance, ignorance and recklessness that plunged the United States into the quagmire of Vietnam. Today’s echo of similar dangers comes from an unlikely source: The Wall Street Journal. While its hawkish editorial page has backed the war in Iraq all the way, the front page trumpeted a story just before the fighting started with the headline: mideast invasions hold many pitfalls, history teaches.
If history teaches anything, it’s that there’s nothing predetermined about our actions. When historians and journalists write their books or articles, they look for the patterns and decisions that produced a particular outcome. Intentionally or not, this can convey the impression that the outcome was inevitable. In most cases, that simply isn’t true. Past leaders and peoples could have made different choices and produced different outcomes. That, in turn, reinforces the notion that our actions and choices matter today. There’s nothing predetermined in what will happen next, in Iraq or elsewhere. We can be informed by history, but never completely guided by it.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.