Archives for March 2004

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.

“Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn’t matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness.”

I haven’t yet even seen the video, and I’m way behind in my reading so I don’t really know what people are saying out there about Richard Clarke’s extraordinary testimony yesterday before the 9/11 Commission. But just reading those words in newspaper reports made me think that the words of the former head of counterterrorism will go down as one of those defining moments in American public life, like the Army-McCarthy hearings’ “Have you no decency, sir, at long last” or the Watergate hearings’ “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

Because Clarke’s words exposed a deep emotional vacuum in the Bush administration’s handling of 9/11. Bush and his team won widespread acclaim for their bullhorn-toting, Bible-waving, smart-bomb-dropping reaction to the terror attacks. And each of those responses had its place, accomplished something in the long process of coming to terms with the death and destruction of that day. But the Bush approach, with its macho swagger punctuated by interludes of lower-lip-biting moments of silence for our collective loss, has never fully satisfied the national psyche.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t recall a single instance when a leading Bush official — someone on the order of a cabinet secretary or above — looked the American people in the eye and either apologized or admitted error. They don’t know how to do it. Admitting mistakes is not in their playbook. Apologies are for wimps and Democrats.

Now Clarke, neither wimp nor Democrat, has done both these things, in simple, direct words — words that, I think, the 9/11 family members and their wider network of friends, relations and sympathizers, a circle that ripples out to include just about all of us, have wanted and needed to hear from someone in a position of responsibility for so long. By uttering these words, Clarke indirectly but boldly underscored their absence from our government’s vocabulary in the entire two-and-a-half-year span of days since 9/11. His action placed Bush’s failure in stark relief. Further, it reminded us that despite the incomparable magnitude of the 9/11 attacks, not a single Bush administration official has resigned, or been asked to resign, to take responsibility for what happened.

It was fear of just such a moment, I think, that led Bush to oppose the formation of a 9/11 commission in the first place. And it is the resonance of the moment with so many other Bush failures that gives it its power. This is an administration that (as Josh Marshall has eloquently argued) does not know how to say “This was our fault.” I’m not saying we can or should blame 9/11 on Bush. But the Bush administration’s habit of finger-pointing — whether talking about the stagnant economy (not the fault of our insane tax policies!), the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (not the fault of our blindered policy-making!) or any other issue of national significance over the past four years — has escalated from a bad habit into a scandal. The stonewalling of responsibility has made it impossible for the nation to figure out what went wrong and make the changes we need to insure it never happens again.

Someone in the executive branch had to stoop down, pick up the famous Harry Truman motto that Bush never seems to have heard, and take its words to heart. That it took a resigned official to do so, and that his doing so evoked an extraordinary barrage of personal assault from the vice president and other Bush officials, is one last stinging reminder that, in the Bush administration, no one’s desk bears a “the buck stops here” plaque. Yesterday, Richard Clarke finally stopped the buck.

I have a little rant up in the War Room, Salon’s election-and-politics blog, about Justice Antonin Scalia’s broadside yesterday — the one in which he argues that we should all go home and stop worrying about his duck-hunting trip with Dick Cheney. Here’s a taste:

The energy task force scandal itself hinges on the question of whether it’s appropriate for the vice president to conduct the public’s business as a private matter among clubby business chums. The Supreme Court must rule on that issue — but here’s Scalia saying the public should not be troubled that his own relationship with Cheney is exactly analogous to the relationships at issue in the energy task force dispute. Scalia just can’t seem to get his inflated head around this; he seems to think that the public is worried that he and Cheney discussed details of the energy case while shooting ducks. Scalia’s memo drips with contempt for both the public and the media –but we’re not that stupid.

The comments discussion of my post about the elections on Spain continues to bubble. I wanted to draw your attention to two reports from Spain. The first is from the comments below, from Jose:

Yesterday we were shown on tv pictures of Bush mentioning cowardice in his response to a question about possible withdrawel of troops from Iraq. But we are not cowards. We did not vote against Aznar on Sunday because we are scared by Al qaeda. Spain has suffered terrorism for many years (ETA) and we believe in fighting terrorism. But we never supported the invasion of Iraq for the reasons (weapons of mass destructing) presented to us.

And Luke Robinson, who was in Barcelona over the weekend, emailed me to point to his posting:

Aznar has not been the most popular man in Spain for quite some time, and, like Bush, questions have arisen surrounding his grasp of the facts (and the truth) regarding the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. I could not say this more clearly: The Spanish were not voting in fear, but in defiance…. as of 5PM on the day of the bombings functionaries within the Spanish government had been told from on high to exploit every opportunity to blame ETA. Aznar himself called several newspapers (including Britain’s Observer) to personally press this line. This was too much for the Spanish to take… They were not voting to withdraw from the war on terrorism – not to be confused with the war on Iraq, which they will probably abandon – but to fight under new leadership that hopefully will do a better job of representing the people of Spain…

The whole post is worth a read.

Also well-argued is Steven Johnson’s post on this subject.