Those who say history will absolve the Iraq warmongers are deluded

[CHIMO]

History will decide, say people airily. Of course history will do no such thing. What they mean to say is that historians of the future will judge the times we live in and make all manner of assumptions on the basis that events can be seen clearer from a distance.

But the wisdom of people who have not been born seems questionable to me because I can never entirely believe that they will match what we know of our own time. It's not an iron rule, naturally, but deferring to people of the future to decide whether something is right or wrong, a ghastly error of judgment or sublime inspiration, seems to me be misguided. History selects and sifts and ends up relegating such things as human suffering to the incidental file.

Take the bodies of 55 Vikings aged between 17 and 25 dug up near Weymouth recently. The young men had been decapitated by Anglo Saxons, possibly in the St Brice's day massacre in 1002, when Ethelred the Unready broke a truce and ordered his troops to massacre any Vikings they could find. What today's historians see in this hasty burial is evidence of an event that led to mass reprisals by Scandinavians and the eventual Viking conquest of Britain in 1013. But the mass grave, of the sort which you might easily find in Bosnia or Rwanda, tells another story of unbearable terror and suffering where young men were stripped naked (no metal clothing clasps were found by archaeologists) and were made to face their executioners before being decapitated then mutilated.

Pain and death suffered by people become less important as time moves on, and that is significant when we come to think about the Iraq war, launched seven years ago this month. Already there is competition for the ear of future historians and there is an attempt under way to fix the record of the actual number of people killed because of the invasion. Little by little the grim reaper is being edited out of the footage.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/14/iran-iraq-afghanistan-wmd

[RationalAltruism]

1. A problem is that there will probably be two sides of history, at least in the near future

With all of the partisanship you see nowadays, I wouldn't be surprised to see the myths about the Iraq perpetuated for at least a decade or more, given the rate at which Republicans are moving to the right. Take, for instance, the messiah-worship of Reagan. The hardcore conservatives are likely to pass their beliefs on to their children, resulting in even greater separation of public opinion from facts, even if mainstream historians disagree.