Salon: Abject failure means never having to say you're sorry

[Raster]

Why Bush and Blair can't admit their colossal mistake in Iraq.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jane Smiley

Oct. 1, 2004 | A piece has been circulating around the Internet in the last few days by Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi that details what life is really like in Baghdad, and it is nothing like Bush and Blair ever wanted or imagined. Foreigners and Iraqis alike are in constant and accelerating danger as the Iraqis grow angrier and angrier at the mess that has been made of their country. The war is lost; the implication of the piece is that more aggressive attacks, such as those planned for after the November elections, will do nothing but further enrage the Iraqi population. Fassihi knows this. I know it. Everyone who has read her piece knows it, and judging by the e-mail chain, everyone by this time is just about everyone. And so, I have to conclude that Tony Blair and George W. Bush also know how bad things are in Iraq -- that their adventure, whatever its motives, has proved an ever-expanding disaster. Of course, to hear them "converse" about it, as Tony Blair did on Tuesday at the Labor Party Conference in Brighton, England, you would never know the truth. Blair did his usual lawyerly thing -- he spoke eloquently about his feelings without actually giving anyone in the opposition a hook. His warm tone implied regret, but the word "sorry" never appeared in his speech.

Why is this? Why do they keep at it, misrepresenting what is going on, though most adults know that acknowledging mistakes is the first step to solving a problem? Even when given repeated chances at the Thursday debate to admit his blunders in Iraq, the most Bush could say -- repeatedly -- was that it was "hard work." Obviously, Bush is in a tight election, and lying and cheating have worked fabulously for him before -- his morals are beneath contempt and also beneath analysis. The job of the average American at this point is just to try to avoid the guy. But what about Blair? His political support is seeping away and he is not allowed by his party to put Iraq behind him, even as he throws his left wing the anti-hunting bone, a patently obvious ploy to distract them from the real issue.

I am reminded of Big Tobacco. I am also reminded of Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial is a kind of play-within-a-play for what is going on in the Middle East.

Big Tobacco knew for years, from the evidence of their own researchers, that cigarettes were an addictive health hazard. Big Tobacco executives refused categorically to admit a truth that was plain as the nose on your face -- cigarettes cause cancer and other life-threatening illnesses and a cigarette-smoking population has astronomical health costs. Big Tobacco executives spent years lying to the courts until they were caught red-handed. Now Big Tobacco faces a potential punitive fine of hundreds of billions of dollars, a fine that could kill the industry, for doing exactly what Tony Blair and George Bush are doing.

<snip, more>

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/10/01/notsorry/