We say that, don’t we? "That’s history." Or, "He’s history." We mean, of course, that "that" or "he" are gone and may be forgotten.
And we are dead wrong.
I have been thinking about "history" ever since listening to Condoleeza Rice testify the other day that the August 6 PDB was mostly historical. And today a reader’s email helped me crystallize my ideas.
It is human nature to dismiss the past. Human nature is flawed. The past is never past, it is here and now, if only in the sense that we evaluate people and events in terms of what we have learned over the years.
Smart folks bring history to the fore, the better to see connections (or lack of) between yesterday and today, the better to be ready for the future. Thus, the CIA mined old and recent intelligence to brief the President.
I do not blame him for not screaming "Eureka!" after reading the material. But it’s plausible that he'd demand more from the briefer, pressure the CIA and FBI to review what they had and alert their troops and, maybe, review anti-hijack procedures, too.
In fact, Richard Clarke says Bush did pressure him to review his work and look for an Iraqi hand in 9/11.
If he didn’t do so after that August 6 briefing, the problem may have been "mind set." The new Administration was focused on Iraq (Clarke details that), not terrorism.
That’s all history, of course. Today’s problem is how to extricate ourselves from the Iraq debacle. To do so, we had better not forget how we got in.
It began when the Bush crowd, having failed to focus on terrorism, decided to use 9/11 to pursue a pre-existing agenda – war on Iraq. Thus, a "war on terrorism."
As if you can war on a tactic.
As if we had not already lost a "war on poverty" and a "war on drugs."
That’s history. Really useful, if you want to think.