Political scientist Pete Moore downloaded a bunch of Coalition Provisional Authority documents about the early period of the US occupation of Iraq. His son inadvertently turned on the “view / track changes” option in the “view” menu in Microsoft Word, and there ended up being a treasure trove of information contained in the markup.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name “Administrator’s Weekly Economic Report” suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author’s paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors.

Moore was especially concerned with the substance of the data contained in this electronic marginalia. It gave him unprecedented insight into the thinking of bureaucrats working for the CPA. During the rest of the article he describes the ostensibly deleted theories that the CPA had for why violence was going up or down in Iraq. Even in the midst of these revelations, which show the extent to which the CPA used ethnic stereotypes and reductionist arguements to “understand” Iraq, Moore takes note of the theories that are missing:

Nowhere in any of these theories, including the “boring” one, does the author address the dissolution of the Iraqi Army as a major contributor to the violence. Nowhere, in fact, does the author seem to know which “bums” or “losers” are attacking the Americans or why. Indeed, the most remarkable passage in the entire deletion is a simple statement by an Iraqi businessman, whom the writer quotes in passing while explaining why American-induced economic prosperity will end the fighting. “It is nothing personal,” the Iraqi says. “I like you and believe you could be bringing us a better future, but I still sympathize with those who attack the coalition because it is not right for Iraq to be occupied by foreign military forces.” In the world of the CPA circa 2004, first one American glosses over this Iraqi’s prophetic words, and then another tries — unsuccessfully, as it turns out — to delete them.

Moore’s work is politically-charged because of its contemporary resonance. However, it makes me think about what sorts of tools and techniques the historians of the future will employ in the course of their research. Additionally it shows how even in electronic records that are tightly controlled a candid and unvarnished reality can be discovered or surmised. In a sense this should be incredibly reassuring to historians in the twenty-first century who fret that the rise of email and electronic documents will render the past inaccessible for scrutiny.

The complete article from Salon: “The secret Iraq documents my 8-year-old found”