The Trouble with Apologies

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Iraq was a country utterly ruined by Saddam Hussein. Paul Bremer has had to rebuild it from the ground up. He has been making dozens of decisions every day, the vast majority of them successful: the economy is reviving, tens of thousands of Iraqis have returned from exile, oil production is near prewar capacity, the country is rebuilding. Did we make any mistakes? Of course we did. The most egregious being not giving enough protection to the pro-Western Ayatullah Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, who was murdered, most likely by followers of the now notorious Muqtada al-Sadr.

Sure, it would have been nice if Bush had said, "Yes, we erred. Perhaps we should not have disbanded the Iraqi army." Would saying that have won him praise for his candor? Not in the poisoned climate of Washington today. Last July, Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, returned from Iraq with a balanced and honest assessment of what the allies had done right and wrong in the immediate postwar period. What was the next morning's Washington Post headline? WOLFOWITZ GIVES NUANCED ASSESSMENT OF IRAQ SITUATION? No. WOLFOWITZ CONCEDES IRAQ ERRORS, followed by a brief for the Administration's critics.

In August 1945, Harry Truman made the weightiest presidential decision of the 20th century. He later said he never lost a night's sleep over dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima. For that, some critics to this day condemn him for lack of reflectiveness--and worse. I'd call it decisiveness. And in wartime, decisiveness counts for more.