What American's Should Expect
Outgoing Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in an interview with Greg Sheridan of The Australian had the following to say about his disappointments:
"I'm disappointed that Iraq hasn't turned out better. And that we weren't able to move forward more meaningfully in the Middle East peace process."
Then, after a minute's pause, he adds a third regret: "The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot." (Hat tip:
Kos)
This is what America should expect from its leaders. Honesty. No great feat. Just a little good old fashioned truth-telling. How much would it do to defuse the anger of those of us who oppose the president if we had any reason to believe that more members of his administration were capable of this kind of reflection?
It is not that we want apologies for apologies sake, it is that we want to believe that our leaders are capable of processing events without the filters of “faith,” “loyalty” and ideology skewing their perceptions of reality.
Does Armitage think the war in Iraq was a mistake? As far as I know he does not. And though I don’t agree with him on that, I can respect him a great deal for acknowledging that things didn’t turn out the way he and others in the administration had hoped. In doing so, he doesn’t insist on moving the goal posts the way that most of the administration and its supporters keep doing. Dani wants us to consider the possibility that things aren’t going so badly in Iraq. Judged against the traditional model of war, the model of long, drawn out engagements, perhaps we are not doing so badly. But that isn’t what the president or the vice-president or any of their strategists believed would happen, and it isn’t what they told the American people would happen.
If I believed that the administration’s strategists were learning from their miscalculations then I would be far more willing to accept their mistakes and trust their future judgments. War is hell, from what I hear, and there are always mistakes.
Condi Rice told the senate committee presiding over her appointment to State that no one could have foreseen the insurgency, by way of excusing the horrendously bad planning for the post-war period. This is beyond untrue: its insulting to the American people. The 41st president cited the near certainty of overwhelming strife in a post-Sadaam Iraq as the major reason why he failed to press on towards Baghdad a decade before the second Gulf War. The question of why Rice feels compelled to lie to the senate and to the American people troubles me to no end.
I have worked in the business world for about a decade. One lesson I have learned is that staff almost always take on the operating style of their boss. Another lesson I have learned is that teams that reflect on mistakes outperform those who invest themselves in denials and cover-ups every time. Taken as a whole, the Bush administration and its mouthpieces have developed a truly pathological hostility to the truth.
It is as if they lie for the sake of lying alone. Take for example the conservative war on Social Security. It is not enough for them to make a stand on the merits of the fairly strong case to be made against social security on grounds ranging from inefficiency to (gasp) unconstitutionality. For reasons that are simply beyond me, the President feels compelled as if by some internal force to make major speeches in which he outright lies - and there can be no other possible way of construing the statements he has made - about the solvency of the program.
There is no doubt in my mind that the men and women of the administration, many of them no doubt solid citizens, are reflecting the nature of their boss.
I am not a partisan who wishes to see the Republicans fail just to prove me right. Though I lack the imagination to convince myself of any set of circumstances by which the situation in Iraq will eventually work out to our advantage, I sure as hell hope it does, and would be more than happy to suffer through four years of Jeb Bush in order to see it happen. What I can’t stand, from Republicans or the opposition, are any more lies. Let us hope that Armitage isn’t the last honest man in this administration.
