Erasing History
Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is about, in part, the way the Soviet government tried to alter history, by erasing people who fell out of favor, from historic photos. It's a memorable novel, even if, as the Amazon page says, appositely, is about something that's no longer there. A few weeks ago I linked to a web site about cosmonauts who died in the early days of the Soviet space program; some of them were erased from pictures. I was brought to mind of these two things by some posts on Dave Farber's Interesting People list regarding an article about Gulf War I by George Bush I and Brent Scrowcroft. Apparently, the article can't be located now on Lexis/Nexis and doesn't seem to be on Time's website, either.
There's a photocopy of the article here. You can see at the bottom, that it's date "March 2, 1998". Yet if you go to Time's site, and their advanced search page here, the article doesn't seem to be found. I restricted the date range to 1998, searched for "Bush," "Scowcroft," and other words in the article (such as "Safwan") and didn't turn up anything. For example, the phrase "Iraqi resistance" cleary occurs in the article, but the search (at this URI) shows a different article from March 2, 1998, but not the Bush-Scowcroft piece.
This Google search, by the way, turns up lots of cases where people typed in this article or parts of it. Here's a very interesting paragraph:
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
Funny that it's not on Time's site now. And good that people are not letting Time and/or the Bushies get away with this kind of erasing of history.
5:40:39 PM Permalink
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