Self-Justification and Political Memoirs

There are many reasons why a politician would write their memoirs - to record a genuinely historical moment in history (like, say, Churchill), to set the record straight (like Nixon tried, and spectacularly failed, to do), to gossip to a much wider audience (Mandelson) and to make a shit load of cash (hello, Bill Clinton). However, with the publication of Bush's book (a tome apparently not written on chew-proof paper with waterproof crayons, much to the astonishment of most) a new form of political memoir has been truly been enshrined - the whiny pile of self-justificatory tripe.

Bush has been defending waterboarding - how he fought for freedom by getting others to torture suspects. It is, of course, entirely justifiable in Bush's worldview - but then again, Bush only sees the world in terms of absolute good and absolute evil. He misses the shades of grey that define existence for most. Yet the very fact that he is having to justify and explain his actions shows how he and his idiotic War on Terror have been tainted since the days when he had a genuine chance to unite pretty much the whole world behind him in an assault on globalised terror.

Bush seems to be claiming that lives were saved by waterboarding. Aside from the fact that this doesn't make it right (torture often works - many nations choose not to do it anyway because they are aspiring to be civilised), waterboarding may have prevented certain terrorist attacks. The operative word there being "may". But how many others have become radicalised because of the stories of US waterboarding of terror suspects? Actions as controversial as water-boarding have consequences, both good and bad. Bush says water-boarding saves lives - I say it will also cost lives in the future - if it hasn't already.

Bush is not alone in publishing this sort of memoir, though. Blair's own book seems to have a large theme running throughout it that basically seems to be saying "Don't judge me because of the Iraq War!" Like Bush, he seems to be fighting for a place in history that doesn't come with the tag of "warmonger" - something that, for neither man, is going to be very easy.

Brown's forthcoming book won't be about the Iraq War - he's not fighting the tag of "warmonger". Rather, he's trying to avoid the caption next to his picture in any history book reading "incompetent cunt". He's going to be banging on about how the recession wasn't his fault, but any signs of recovery (however slim) were entirely down to him. His book gives every indication of being a wretched last gasp of a desperate man who has not quite come to terms with the fact that he utterly fucked up in the job he fought for across his adult life. It is Brown's last-ditch attempt to avoid being tagged as a failure for the rest of time (or at least until his abortion of an administration is forgotten - which, given the levels of the debt he left us with, will be quite some time). Like Bush and Blair, he's seemingly destined to fail.

Of course, the books of all three men will make lots of money (even if some of it will be grudgingly given to charity by some of the authors) and keep the authors in the public eye. But the tone of these books seems to be about the last ditch attempt to carve out a place in the history books. None of these men deserve anything more than consignment to the dustbin of history as incompetent, immoral failures. So if you do waste your time and money by buying and then reading their books, just keep in mind that these tomes are nothing more than the final, desperate ramblings of compromised men.