From President Bush on down, no one in this administration ever admits a mistake or concedes having been wrong.Consider Jim Lehrer's questioning of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on March 25. PBS' 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. Had Rumsfeld 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.
If a Japanese government had performed as badly as the Bush administration has, there would be no one left to turn out the lights. In the interview, Rumsfeld made the point that the U.S. does not have the British cabinet system or the Japanese culture regarding shame and accountability. But it is not heads the American people want, it is humility.
That is what's so lacking in the Bush administration. 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 that 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. It turned out, though, that the "missiles" that struck the U.S. had the logos of American and United Airlines on their fuselages. It would have taken hard spy work and, as they say, boots on the ground in Afghanistan to stop them. It would have taken a little humility.
That quality is precisely what commended the not-terribly-humble Richard Clarke to many of the 9/11 families: He apologized. Lehrer cited Clarke's example to Rumsfeld, who just didn't get it. In fact, he recited all the reasons why 9/11 was really not his - or anyone else in the Bush administration's - fault.
What is so perturbing about this administration is not that no one of note has resigned or been fired - and some of them certainly deserve the ax - but that there is not the slightest hint that anyone (except Secretary of State Powell) appreciates that mistakes were made not out of sheer bad luck, but because the assumptions, driven by ideology, were so bad.
Terrorism, not missile defense, should have been the top priority; Al Qaeda was and remains the threat, not Iraq. That explains why Saddam is in jail while Osama Bin Laden is still on the loose, having slipped the noose 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.
