Commentary

'Bushies' dodge accountability with smugness

Posted 4/7/2004

What happened March 25 was one Washington institution quoted another to ask a third about
accountability. The questioner was PBS' Jim Lehrer, who cited the late James Reston of The
New York Times to ask Donald Rumsfeld why no one in Washington ever resigns for just
being wrong. Rumsfeld, oozing cockiness, turned the personal into the theoretical and
waltzed away from the question. I don't blame him. If, say, a Japanese government had
performed as badly as the Bush administration has, there would be no one left to turn out the
lights.

In his questioning of Rumsfeld, the nimble Lehrer brought up Lord Carrington, the British
defense minister at the time Argentina seized the Falkland Islands. Carrington admitted he had
underestimated the threat and his resignation was therefore in order. If Rumsfeld had applied
that rule to himself, he would be thrice gone - once for Sept. 11, once for the absence of
WMD in Iraq and once more for not having enough troops in Iraq. If he were his own
subordinate, he would fire himself.

But from the president on down, no one in this administration ever admits a mistake or
concedes having been wrong. Dick Cheney, whose slogan should be "Wrong Where It
Matters," nonetheless takes to the stump to lambaste John Kerry. After all, the vice president
is the very man who warned us, assured us, we must go to war with Iraq because, among
other things, that nation had an ongoing nuclear weapons program. None has yet been found
- and no apology from Cheney has yet been issued. He was mistaken or dishonest.
We await his choice.
The real reason-the administration was oh-so-slow to recognize the terrorist threat was precisely
the quality so abundant in Rumsfeld: smugness. The Bushies knew it all.

The very fact the Clinton team told them to make terrorism job one led them to denigrate it:
What did those Clinton jerks know?
Instead, the Bush team had its eye on the ball - missile defense and, of course,
China and Russia. But it turned out the "missiles" that struck the United States
had the logos of American and United Airlines on their fuselages, and no Star Wars system
could have stopped them. It would have taken hard spy work and, as they say, boots on the
ground in Afghanistan. It would have taken a little humility.

That quality is precisely what commended the not-terribly-humble Richard Clarke to many of
the Sept. 11 families: He was sorry for what happened and sorry that, somehow, his efforts
had not managed to avert a calamity. Lehrer cited Clarke's example to Rumsfeld, who just
didn't get it. In fact, he recited all the reasons why Sept. 11 was really not his - or anyone
else in the Bush administration's - fault. In spirit, he echoed Bush, who once said, "Had I
known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have
done everything in my power to protect the American people." Yes, and had Custer known
he was attacking so many Indians, he might have chosen to wash his hair that day instead.

What is so perturbing about this administration is not that no one of note has resigned or
been fired - and some certainly deserve the ax - but that there is not the slightest hint anyone
(except Colin Powell) appreciates mistakes were made not out of bad luck, but because
assumptions, driven by ideology, were so bad.

Terrorism, not missile defense, should have been the top priority; al-Qaida was and remains
the threat, not Iraq. (That explains why Saddam is in jail while bin Laden is still on the loose,
having slipped the noose in Afghanistan because the Pentagon left the job to locals.) Iraq
was going to be a cakewalk - the Middle Eastern version of the liberation of Paris - and
somehow that has not happened. In another country, some officials would quit in shame.
In this one, they can't even quit being smug.