Mistakes Made

Perhaps one consistency that can be found in politics is the rarity of a politician admitting that mistakes were made.

In a sense, the revulsion to do so is understandable. The public will see you as fallible. (We know this going in, but hate to admit it to ourselves.) Your opponents will seize on it as a parrot on a treat stick (a parrot on a treat stick makes a dog on a bone look tame) - and will gnaw on it 'till nothing remains. Maybe if we the people were a bit more forgiving, our politicians would more readily acknowledge a wrong course.

Martin Peretz in The New Republic discusses mistakes made, and how we should choose in light of them.

If Bush is lying about Iraq, so is Kerry. It's not just that he has exaggerated what has gone wrong in Iraq. His entire speech was premised on the assumption that there were European troops and Muslim troops and United Nations gendarmes who would have gone to war with us against Saddam had Bush only waited another few days, weeks, months in the spring of 2003. That is a lie. And now, he holds out the same false promise.

On Iraq, Peretz is with Bush.

I am repelled by how he and his crowd play fast and loose with the facts, by their elevation of their foreign policy reasoning into some kind of catechism. Still, Iraq without Saddam Hussein is like Russia without Josef Stalin: By no means perfect, but a vast improvement.

And Peretz believes that some of Bush's largest errors may well have come from too much optimism about Arab culture.

They thought moderation and tolerance would be the inevitable legacy of Saddam's fall. But they underestimated the deforming injuries Saddam inflicted on the Iraqi population. And they underestimated the cultural gap between us and them. (In this, they were aided by generations of Arabist diplomats and professors who downplayed cultural difference. Ironically, it is just these types who are now saying this optimistic view is naïve, which it probably is.) The Bush administration underestimated the bloody zealotry of Iraqi factions, both secular and pious. It did not comprehend that Al Jazeera and much of the Arab media would root for the killers. It did not grasp sufficiently that Iraq's neighbors wished the Iraqis ill, that Syria--a brutal Alawite minority regime that has slaughtered thousands of Sunni militants--would give them free passage to do mayhem next door.

I am reminded a bit of my own ancestors in this regard.

As a child growing up in a city with more Holocaust survivors than any other in the U.S., it was impossible not to learn about the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis. If the lessons were not taught in school, I needed to look no further than the numbers that were tatooed forever on the arms of some of my friends' parents. I need only talk to the friends whose siblings resided not at home with them, but instead existed as dust from the ovens of Auschwitz.

I never could understand: why didn't the Jews leave Germany before it got so bad? Why didn't they leave before leaving was no longer an option, and the only options left were hoping that the torture would not be too horrific, that death would be merciful?

My parents (fortunately not Holocaust survivors themselves) tried to explain it to me. "Germany was thought of as an advanced and civilized country. Before the Holocaust, Jews were accepted a bit better than in other nations. Even when bad things started to happen, no one could imagine that the Nazis could perpetrate what they did."

Maybe the same trap befell the Bush administration. People could not imagine the terrors that radical Islam was willing to wage, both upon us and upon its own people.

Should they have anticipated? Perhaps.

But before we reject this administration and its errors, we must weigh. Do we really think that a Kerry administration would handle world affairs and terrorism better? Do we want the future of our nation and the world in the hands of Kofi Annan and the U.N.?

As Peretz states, we must choose between a lesser evil.

In my book, that lesser evil is Bush. I will take the man who liberated a people, who refused to wait until the danger to our people became too great.

Yes, mistakes were made.

Let us not, however, forget the mistakes that were never allowed to occur.

Comments

[Ally]

WOW! That is awesome, Peg. You gave me goosebumps! I can't wait to link this post. You have such an awesome insight and way with words. And what an excellent analogy.

[John Anderson]

"But before we reject this administration and its errors, we must weigh. Do we really think that a Kerry administration would handle world affairs and terrorism better? Do we want the future of our nation and the world in the hands of Kofi Annan and the U.N.?"

Not I. And I wish someone would pin down Kerry on just what allies he would have gotten aboard for deposing Saddam after over a decade of non-compliance with UN resolutions and at least weekly shooting at the planes enforcing the UN's "flyover" plan. OK, we all know he means France and Germany (January 2003: NYTimes quotes France's Chirac to the effect that "under NO circumstances would we agree to depose Saddam"), I just want it spelled out so he could be asked just HOW he would have gotten them to do anything during 2001-2003? Heck, even now they feel it too dangerous to send in anyone and insist that their contribution (training police/troops) be done outside the Middle East.

[Maximus]

Peg, whether you're voting Republican or not, it's not true that no one could examine the mayhem that might ensue after an invasion.

I specifically remember people warning that there would be civil strife between the minorities in Iraq which might still occur.

And I myself wondered how the Iraqis would see the Americans as liberators when they had been subject to so much propaganda against them and, indeed, had fought a war against them. Moreover, the Shiites and the Kurds had been betrayed to some extent by the sloppiness of the Gulf War coalition which allowed them to be attacked by Saddam after the war ended. (Eventually the fly-overs were initiated to protect them).

I'll bet that if you surf around you can find a number of articles warning about the ugliness that would ensue after the takeover.