Warming Up

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Sunday 16th March 2003

The thing with studying history is you usually know how things turned out in the end. So Neville Chamberlain and his piece of paper seem in hindsight like the worthless and misguided things that they both were. Of course what you don’t know is how people felt when they heard about what Chamberlain had done. Did they think, “Good, that’s Hitler sorted then, there will definitely not be a war” or “That piece of paper isn’t worth the piece of paper that it is”? (Ironically I bet that piece of paper is worth a lot of money today, if it’s still around and if Hitler didn’t ask for it back so he could wipe his arse on it.)
The point is that at the time no-one knew what was going to happen, though they may have had suspicions, and until you reach one of those turning points in history you can’t really judge.
So today I watched Bush and Blair and some Spanish bloke with a nice moustache basically inform me that it’s time for war, with a sick feeling in my stomach. Because we don’t know how this one turns out yet do we? Though my guess is it’s not going to turn out very well for any of us. I also suspect if the war didn’t happen that it’s not going to be that great for any of us either. I reckon we’re pretty much fucked in the long run, whether Saddam Hussein is around or not.
There's no way to deal with three blokes with a bag of anthrax or a box with a bomb in it. Eventually between now and the end of history it's inevitable that someone succeeds.
So let’s live a bit of history and hope most of us are still around in thirty years time to work out whether Bush and Blair’s decision was a good one, a bad one or whether it made little difference in the long run.
Hope you have a good week.