Blogging was down for 3 days while Salon moved its offices — from floor number 16 to floor number 11 of the same building. The move signified nothing other than a convenience between us and our landlord, but the box that hosts my Radio Userland was offline all weekend.
Back to the world, now! Jeff Jarvis quoted my post on Clarke’s apology to the 9/11 commission and commented:
Oh, fercrhissake, this is not about feelings! This is about life and death! This is about finding bad guys and killing them before they kill us. Enough with apologies and emotions and psyches. This is war. Let’s go win it. |
But surely war is one of the most emotionally intense experiences humankind has created. And how can we talk about “life and death” as if there are no “feelings” involved? What could be more emotional? I really don’t get the objection — unless it stems from a generic attitude that “talking about feelings is for wimps,” which I think is beneath Jarvis.
There is a direct connection between the ability to handle emotions healthily and the ability to win a war. (Why do you think the U.S. armed forces devote so much energy and time toward trying to cope with stress, trauma and the awful emotional toll of combat?) Clarke’s apology was so powerful because it opened a door leading beyond the grief over 9/11 that so many still feel — a door that the Bush administration has resolutely kept closed. If we’re fighting a war to win, and we’re still a democracy, then tending the national psyche remains an important part of the president’s portfolio.
One of the psychological values of admitting error, of course, is that only after you’ve admitted that you made a mistake can you begin to learn from it. No one in his right mind, Richard Clarke included, believes that the Bush administration averted its gaze from specific, detailed intelligence it could have used to save the World Trade Center. (This is why the president’s rebuttal — “had my administration had any information that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would have acted” — is so off-the-point.) It’s very clear now that the Bush administration failed to make fighting Al-Qaida terrorism a priority before 9/11. And, really, that’s okay; it was a new administration, it was bound to make some goofs, and the disaster of 9/11 could have happened on any president’s watch.
That doesn’t mean Bush couldn’t have stepped forward and admitted the obvious — that 9/11 represented a colossal failure of the American government to protect the American people. How could it not be? And why is it so hard just to say so and move on? Why did it take 2 1/2 years for any official to be able to bring him or herself to the point of uttering this plain fact?
The problem with the Bush gang’s refusal to take any responsibility for its failures is not simply that it has hindered us from putting the ghosts of 9/11 to rest; it’s that, as Josh Marshall points out here — it made it impossible for them to learn from their mistakes:
Screw-ups happen; mistakes happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to learn from them. Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September 12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 — exploiting it, really — to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by 9/11. They shoe-horned everything they’d been trying to do before the attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to deceive the public and themselves to do it. |
So I think it’s awfully simplistic to just say, “this is about finding bad guys and killing them before they kill us”, and banish the very subject of emotions from the table. The most fervent theorists of the war on terror insist that it is a vast, complex global chess game spanning continents and decades. Painful as it is to accept this, they are probably right.
If it were just a matter of “finding bad guys and killing them,” maybe we wouldn’t have to worry about messy things like the morale of the American people. But Bush’s failure of moral leadership has actually made it harder for the U.S. to maintain the will it needs in this fight. Clarke’s apology took one step toward correcting that. Bush will never understand this, but Clarke was, in an obtuse way, helping the president.
UPDATE: Jarvis responds here. Good heated discussion in the comments there, too.
AND MORE: Chris Nolan has further comments as well.
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