Mistakes were made, and sometimes admitted

Life just isn’t this tidy. I thought I heard it all when former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who so engineered the Vietnam quagmire that they called it “McNamara’s war,” said at the end of it all that it was “wrong, terribly wrong.” Agreeing with the millions of dissidents, after the sacrifice of 58,000 U.S. troops and perhaps 2 million Vietnamese, he spoke with repentance that it had all been a multi-year, bipartisan catastrophe to no avail. He was man enough to take public responsibility for it.

Then came former Chairman of the Federal Reserve of four presidents, perhaps the most influential man in America for nearly three decades, Dr. Alan Greenspan. He admitted to Congress last year that the bedrock foundation of his economic rationale was flawed. He had taken guidance from Ayn Rand, celebrated apologist of egoism (her 1964 title might give her away: “The Virtue of Selfishness”). It was his idea to deregulate the financial markets and allow them to regulate themselves because he thought that the banks’ self-interest would collectively police the whole apparatus. But give him credit for fortitude. He took ownership of his naive faith in lawless individualism.

Digging out from the rubble of Vietnam and from today’s depression that has wrecked the lives of millions, it helps to hear such rare apologies from on high. It is gratifying to hear these two. Maybe we should be satisfied and not look for more. The hubris of the mighty almost demands immunity from such pedestrian things as admitting mistakes. To expect humility would be a case of less majesty.

So here are some apologies we won’t hear. We won’t get an admission that the emperor had no clothes when he launched a fierce invasion against the known wrong enemy to avenge 9/11. A year and a half after al Qaeda’s four hijackings, unable to find the arch criminal who instigated 9/11, Osama bin Laden, whom we knew to be the blame on 9/12, whom we knew to despise Saddam Hussein, whom we knew to have attacked us several times before, we invaded the wrong enemy, who also happened to be a Muslim.

We won’t hear apologies for vice-presidential cherry-picking of top intelligence to allege weapons of mass destruction. We won’t hear apologies of top-government orders to torture prisoners and then blame the “few bad apples” of lower rank. We won’t hear apologies for shredding the Constitution, the land’s supreme law. Don’t wait up for them.

Neither will we hear from the armchair warriors within the church who heard Pope John Paul several times condemn the Iraq war as “without legal or moral justification” even as they chided war critics. Pious silence emanates from where there should be virile humility.

We Americans seem to have a 15-minute memory span. We easily forget the mega-tragedies of war and depression perhaps because they are too painful to analyze afterwards, with a view to not letting them happen again. For the same militaristic contempt for foreign cultures that enabled Vietnam is in place to justify the $2.5 billion per week we have no problem paying for Iraq, which helped to bankrupt us economically. The same ruthless rugged individualism of Ayn Rand that enabled the deregulating of fiscal pirates, so that they would not be overburdened with stopgaps carefully put in place by both parties since the Great Depression, is solidly in place.

French novelist Albert Camus ends his depressing novel ‘The Plague” by saying that the bubonic scourge that had decimated a north African port had not been overcome by the protagonist doctor who worked tirelessly at great risk to himself. It merely went underground, ready to re-surface at any time. People could take no comfort that new cases were not being reported. Life took on a permanent edge of fear. So too with us, who rush headlong into the future so as to escape the unresolved past.

Say what you want about a South African style truth investigation here. When the curse of apartheid finally collapsed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former prisoner and President Nelson Mandela, both of whom had suffered from the nation’s legal segregation, had the magnanimity to guide governmental reform to learn from national error.