Dot in the Sky (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dotinthesky) wrote2003-03-29 01:40 pm
dotinthesky) wrote2003-03-29 01:40 pm
Lions led by Donkeys
The historian Barbara Tuchman began her book The March of Folly with these words: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”
How, she asked, could the Trojans persuade themselves that it was to their advantage to drag the wooden horse inside their walls? How, she asked, could the early 16th-century popes blind themselves to the encouragement that their own venal, greedy and calamitous behaviour gave to the protestant secession? How, she asked, coming closer to the present day, could the US refuse for so long to see that its goals in Vietnam were unattainable and the consequences damaging for American society and for its global reputation?
For a policy to qualify as folly, Mrs. Tuchman wrote, three criteria had to be fulfilled: first, the policy must have been perceived as counterproductive at the time, rather than merely in hindsight; second, a feasible alternative policy must have been available; and, third, the policy should have been that of a group, not of one individual ruler alone. Ominously, Mr. Blair’s Iraq policy fulfils all three. It has provoked more opposition for longer than anything else that Mr. Blair has ever done. There was a clear multilateral diplomatic alternative, which Mr. Blair rejected. And the policy has been the almost sacred collective faith of an entire generation of American neo-conservatives, to whom Mr. Blair has attached himself.
“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us,” Coleridge wrote. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.”
- The Guardian’s Editor page, March 29, 2003.
How, she asked, could the Trojans persuade themselves that it was to their advantage to drag the wooden horse inside their walls? How, she asked, could the early 16th-century popes blind themselves to the encouragement that their own venal, greedy and calamitous behaviour gave to the protestant secession? How, she asked, coming closer to the present day, could the US refuse for so long to see that its goals in Vietnam were unattainable and the consequences damaging for American society and for its global reputation?
For a policy to qualify as folly, Mrs. Tuchman wrote, three criteria had to be fulfilled: first, the policy must have been perceived as counterproductive at the time, rather than merely in hindsight; second, a feasible alternative policy must have been available; and, third, the policy should have been that of a group, not of one individual ruler alone. Ominously, Mr. Blair’s Iraq policy fulfils all three. It has provoked more opposition for longer than anything else that Mr. Blair has ever done. There was a clear multilateral diplomatic alternative, which Mr. Blair rejected. And the policy has been the almost sacred collective faith of an entire generation of American neo-conservatives, to whom Mr. Blair has attached himself.
“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us,” Coleridge wrote. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.”
- The Guardian’s Editor page, March 29, 2003.
no subject
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Now that the war is on the way, they have backtracked on all their promises to Blair.
He was royally screwed. And because of that, he has destroyed his political career.
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