(World News Trust) -- Erich Segal, the author of "Love Story," once put the phrase "Love
means never having to say you're sorry" into the official collection of
favorite American catch-phrases. Up until very recently, we've had to
suffer under a latter-day perversion of that: "The 'War on Terror'
means never having to say you're sorry." Now, however, comes a series
in Slate -- http://www.slate.com/id/2186757/
-- called "Why Did We Get It Wrong," five years after the start of the
Iraq War/ Invasion/ Occupation. Slate invited what it called "the best
known 'liberal hawks' and others" to weigh in on that question, five
years after they were roaring and stamping their feet to go get Saddam.
The compendium makes for some ironic and even sadly amusing reading.
One by one, they come with their mea culpas and their tails between
their legs, explaining themselves, voicing contrition. Thus they
attempt what nobody in the White House or the American Enterprise
Institute or among the armchair warriors in the GOP (or in some corners
of the Democratic Party) has yet been grown-up enough to do: admitting
they were wrong. And I'm left wondering how to react. I probably should
try to be forgiving. I probably ought to "take the high road" (which,
in politics these days, seems to me to be the road that takes you
straight over a cliff). I probably should open my arms to these
prodigal sons and accept them back into the family with great love and
generosity, putting all that nasty stuff and misguided behavior from
the past behind me.
But a large part of me doesn't want to. Yes, I know, it's hard to fess
up, especially in public, particularly when you put yourself out there
loudly and vigorously, trusting your president and his many mouthpieces
and advocates. We heard all the excuses -- about how the administration
and its neocon friends obviously saw or knew or had heard more than we
mere civilians did. We were told to trust, to give them the benefit of
the doubt, never to second-guess Our President who knew better and was
pushing this for all the right reasons. After all, we were repeatedly
and falsely assured, he himself was dragged kicking and screaming into
war -- a war of last resort. We should celebrate all these sorrowful
schnooks and make it easy on them now that they've stopped drinking the
Kool-aid. Allow them to go gently into that good, conscience-assuaged
night, free as birds.
I'm sorry, too, because I'd like for some of these gentlepeople to know
-- it's not enough just to say you made a mistake, and to assume by
doing so that you still get to pass "Go" and you still get to collect
your 200 dollars -- AND a free "Get Out of Jail" card. That's the easy
way that allows you good folks to go skipping off to another carefree
day of shopping and other assorted superficialities -- the remedy George
W. Bush once prescribed to a nation desperate to recover from the shock
and awe of September 11th.
These correspondents I'm sure were well-intentioned (with many of the
same good intentions that pave the way to Hell). They wanted to
believe. They wanted to trust their president and his many war-lusting
advisors. They wanted to refight Vietnam and win this time. They wanted
to show the world that jamming our way down other nation's throats was
THE way to go, especially since we had all that power to strut around
with. They yearned for the certainty that after such a blow as that
which felled the World Trade Center, we could storm across the Middle
East in the flower of our greatest virility to prove that we weren't
neutered or knee-capped or otherwise humbled after all. The Fred
Kaplans of the world admitted they'd fallen for Colin Powell's
presentation at the UN, that they were mad not just at Saddam and al
Qaeda and all those bearded boogeymen out there, but also Russia and
France and other world powers that tried to cool us down and talk some
sense into us. The Andrew Sullivans of the world admitted they'd
misread Bush's "sense of morality," and swallowed whole every sales
pitch about how getting rid of Saddam would be so quick and easy, and
would magically solve all our problems in the Middle East! The Jeffrey
Goldbergs of the world lamented that -- in the finest Condoleeza Rice
tradition -- "NOONE could have IMAGINED" how reckless, arrogant,
pigheaded, and utterly incompetent the Bush people were, including all
those nice, legendary, seasoned, veteran heavyweights of Republican
regimes past.
Amazingly, many of these same newly-sobered writers also now admit with
chagrin that they should have listened to the dissidents more, should
have paid greater attention to their views, should have made time to
consider their warnings. They rue the day they put people like Hans
Blix and Scott Ritter on "ignore." NOW they regret that they couldn't
have been bothered, back then, to research the motivations of the
war-pushers and the greed and monopoly-hungry geo-sadism that propelled
them, to look at who REALLY stood to benefit by this unilateral
aggression and its constantly mutating rationales (to this very day),
or made any room for the objections of millions upon millions of
protesters on every continent. Easy for them to say.
Now, my memory may be faulty, but as I recall, not one of these
sword-swallowers who've now "seen the light" ever backed up his
convictions the way our soldiers did -- by putting their money where
their big, judgmental, accusatory, more-patriotic-than-thou mouths
were. None of them actually signed up or suited up for Iraq,
themselves. It was far easier to let the smooth-talkers lull them to
sleep by assuring them it wouldn't take much time, or that much of our
military, OR that much of our money to accomplish this. All those
billions in Iraqi oil revenues would pay for it all, remember? We could
get in and get out painlessly, on the cheap, and then go have a nice
day. No muss, no fuss. Somebody else would do the heavy lifting - and
besides, our troops volunteered anyway, so they obviously asked for
whatever horrors befell them. No runs, drips or errors!
Could that same simplistic thinking, that gullible, surface-treatment
reasoning, be informing these eloquent mea culpas now? Oopsie! I
goofed. There. I said it. I'm done, okay? Next?
Not so fast!
What I want to know is -- now that the easy part is over, in which all
these sincere and apologetic folks don their sackcloth and ashes for
the length of time it takes to read their confessions, what do they
intend to do about it that will put meaning and strength behind all
those words. If they really seek absolution, they need to prove they're
worthy of it. It's not enough simply to say they made a mistake.
I think the rest of us, especially those of us at whom they sneered
when we tried so desperately to stop the war, are owed more than that.
What about those of us who appealed, petitioned, phoned, emailed,
marched, wrote, blogged, begged our representatives, and tried in vain
to get a word in edgewise on tone-deaf talk radio, only to be laughed
at, flipped off, vandalized, threatened, bullied, scorned, and
demonized?
And never mind us! What do the chastened ones plan to do to earn the
forgiveness of some four thousand nice new widows and widowers,
grieving moms and dads, confused and disoriented -- and orphaned
children? THOSE are hearts and minds that need winning, too. It's not
enough to promise that their loved ones won't have died in vain -- by
dooming more Americans to that same needless sacrifice too. It's not
enough to keep repeating that abortive message as the survivors are
forced to pick up the pieces of their broken heaerts and cope for the
rest of their lives without that beloved husband or wife, or father or
mother, whose loss the war-advocates helped make happen.
What do these newly-awakened converts plan to do, REALLY, to prove that
they won't get fooled again the next time some war-crazed chickenhawk
with unspoken financial interests in creative Middle Eastern
destruction starts accusing them of being soft on terror? How do they
plan to convince the rest of us that they won't fall prey to the
idiotic notion that we can simply force our will upon other nations
whether it makes sense or not? How will they prove that they will look
harder and more critically at the sales pitches next time around, so
they'll recognize when they're being lied to -- particularly when most
of the liars never bothered with military service when they had the
chance, never saw combat, whose only war experience included watching
John Wayne movies or playing war videogames, and whose track record on
all of the above was available for anyone to see?
Perhaps even more critically important, what do any of these
well-meaning penitents intend to do -- to make sure the engineers of
this epic debacle shoulder true responsibility, as well? Are those
saying "sorry" now at all interested in seeking redress or
accountability among those who unapologetically danced them down the
garden path in the first place? Will there be any consequences imposed
upon the deliberate deceivers? Will there be any lessons taught - not
only to the warmongers themselves but for the benefit of all future
pampered war-pushers whose arrogant belligerence may only be curbed if
they know there'll be a heavy price to pay for being wrong? If, say, a
president and vice president hell-bent on war -- who willfully lead a
nation astray and thousands of brave soldiers to unnecessary deaths --
knew they would be facing certain impeachment, indictment, prosecution,
and perhaps even incarceration, how eager might they be to press their
case the next time? And what if those who enabled this dreadful sin,
whether they be saber-rattling pundits or intimidated reporters, also
had serious penalties to face -- for malpractice or gross dereliction of
duty at the very least?
It's mighty easy just to say you're sorry after you helped cause the
carnage and the horrors and the waste, and helped to make us more hated
and more vulnerable than ever before. How do we know you won't allow
yourselves to be pressured, or sweet-talked, into being suckered again,
and drag the rest of us down into the meat-grinder whose crank carries
your fingerprints, also?
It was easy, way TOO easy, to get us into this mess. Getting us out
will be anything but. And getting off with a mere "oops! I got it
wrong" is a little too easy also. True redemption, as much of the world
was reminded over the Easter season, takes a LOT more than that.
***
Mary Lyon
is a veteran broadcaster and five-time Golden Mike Award winner, who
has anchored, reported, and written for the Associated Press Radio
Network, NBC Radio "The Source," and many Los Angeles-area stations
including KRTH-FM/AM, KLOS-FM, KFWB-AM, and KTLA-TV, and occasional
media analyst for ABC Radio News. She began her career as a liberal
activist with the Student Coalition for Humphrey/Muskie in 1968, and
helped spearhead a regional campaign, The Power 18," to win the right
to vote for 18-year-olds. She remains an advocate for liberal causes,
responsibility and accountability in media, environmental education and
support of the arts for children, and green living. In addition to
OpEdNews, Mary writes for Democrats.us, World News Trust, and
WeDemocrats.org's "We! The People" webzine. Mary is also a parenting
expert, having written and llustrated the book "The Frazzled Working
Woman's Practical Guide to Motherhood.