Tony Blair - "Let History Judge"

Question of the day: when politicians say "let history judge," how do they frame their roles in that political process? The role of their constituents and fellow citizens?

From: TypicallySpanish.com

Tony Blair to El País: It is history which must judge if the decision to invade Iraq was correct

By m.p. - Nov 29, 2009 - 3:30 PM

The former UK Prime Minister told the newspaper that he would again do everything he could to expel Saddam Hussein

The UK’s former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was in Madrid last week, and included a journalist from El País in a round of interviews which were organised for last Thursday. The Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s involvement in Iraq began in the UK last week, and the interviewer, José Manuel Clavo, asked Mr Blair if he would take the same decision again to invade.

Mr Blair answered ‘We would have to take into account that the information we received turned out to be incorrect,’ but added, ‘If you are asking me if I would again do everything I could to expel Saddam, the answer, clearly, is yes’. And when asked if, looking back, he had any doubts or anything he regretted, the reply was, ‘I always say that what came after deposing Saddam was much worse than we could have foreseen’.

It is history, Mr Blair said, which must be the judge of whether the decision was correct or not.

The Chilcot Inquiry opened last Tuesday and this week’s Mail on Sunday has revealed that Tony Blair may be questioned over a memo from the UK’s Attorney General which had warned him that an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein would be in breach of international law. The paper said the letter from Lord Goldsmith was sent to the Prime Minister eight months before the war, and claims that Goldsmith was ‘gagged’ and a cover-up was ordered by Blair.

Goldsmith is said to have been under such pressure to keep quiet about the letter, which was allegedly even kept from the Cabinet, that he lost a massive amount of weight and threatened to resign, before he eventually gave qualified legal backing to the conflict. The letter is now understood to be in the possession of the inquiry and both Mr Blair and Lord Goldsmith will likely be questioned about it when they are called to give evidence next year.

Welcome to My New Blog

For over a year now, I have maintained a blog on the memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in contemporary Spain. I have no immediate plans to stop posting to that blog, (Re) Generando Memorias. In fact, I am more active there now than at any other time.

I am beginning "Memory, Amnesia and Politics" with the hope of expanding or supplementing my first blog, as well as reaching a more largely English-speaking audience [a majority of visitors to (Re) Generando Memorias are from Spain]. For now, the goal of this blog will be to post relevant news items on the ways in which history, memory and politics interact. At the time, I do not plan to offer much commentary. As was the case with my first blog, this is also an experiment and comes out of a class I plan to offer next semester.

During spring semester 2010, I will teach an honors seminar in English which adopts a Memory Studies approach in looking at the ways we construct personal, familial and national narratives about traumatic historical events. Because the course is only offered for half the semester, we must limit our readings; our main focus will be on 9-11, the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. Some of the primary texts I am considering are Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Maus. Theoretical readings will come from Freud, Dori Laub, Marianne Hirsch and Susan Sontag, among others. We will also address amnesia and forgetting, appealing to Paul Connerton's recent article in Memory Studies, "Seven Types of Forgetting." In all the talk about memory and trauma, we often omit a more productive discussion of the ways in which narratives come about via the processes of forgetting.

Jenny Edkins, the author of Trauma and the Memory of Politics, says elsewhere, "memory is not an add-on to the study of politics." It is this central idea on which this blog is founded. We cannot understand what is happening in our political system without taking a critical look at how those in power appeal to memory and forgetting -- perhaps, particularly in relation to traumatic historical events -- in order to promote or displace certain agendas.