"President Bush, during your last four years, you have made thousands
of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three
instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision
and what you did to correct it. Thank you."
This was the final question the President was asked in his debate with
Senator Kerry on Friday, October 9. Similar queries had been addressed
to him at other occasions, but in each case he could not, or would not,
admit that he, the leader of "the most powerful nation on earth,"
had ever been wrong. Once he joked that some of his "appointments"
may have been mistaken, but he could not concede that any of his major
choices had ever been in error.
Quite to the contrary, when asked about wrong decisions, Mr. Bush used
the question to show how much his policies have been right on target:
"They're trying to say, 'Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?'
And the answer is, 'Absolutely not.' It was the right decision."
Even if one agreed with this assertion, numerous other presidential
actions or statements come to mind that might have been serious mistakes.
Was it a mistake to mislead the American people, particularly Congress,
about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Was it a
mistake to overrule Army Chief of Staff Shinseki when he estimated that
several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were needed to invade and occupy
Iraq, but only 130,000 were there as late as March 2004?
Was it a mistake to tell the American people that our soldiers would
be greeted as liberators? Was it a mistake not to secure Iraq's infrastructure
from hundreds of looters and growing chaos?
Was it a mistake to launch the invasion of Iraq without having prepared
a clear exit strategy? Was it a mistake to allow FBI and CIA to read
our e-mail and to check into our library reading records without a search
warrant?
Was it a mistake to burden our country with a $374 billion dollar budget
deficit for fiscal 2004, the largest dollar amount ever for one year?
Was it a mistake to raise the allowable level of arsenic in America's
drinking water?
Was it a mistake to walk away from the Kyoto Protocol, the land mine
treaty, and the international criminal court?
After the world learned that American soldiers had tortured Iraqi prisoners,
President Bush took the unusual step to appear on two Arab television
stations and condemn the mistreatment of Iraqi prison inmates. He called
the abuse "abhorrent" and said "the actions of these
few people do not reflect the hearts of the American people." He
told his Arab audience that what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison was
"not America," but he did not apologize for the guards' violations
of human rights and our own criminal law, even though saying "I
am sorry!" would have been the truly civilized response.
Perhaps to make up for this damaging omission, Mr. Bush raised the issue
behind closed doors with visiting King Abdullah of Jordan. "I told
him," the President told Fox News, "I was sorry for the humiliation
suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their
families." When asked if he would fire Donald Rumsfeld, the official
responsible to him for the conduct of the armed forces, Mr. Bush staunchly
defended his secretary's mistakes and failure to apologize to the Iraqis:
"Secretary Rumsfeld is a really good secretary of defense. Secretary
Rumsfeld has served our nation well."
When Condaleeza Rice, one the President's closest advisers, appeared
before the 9/11 Commission, she stuck to her insistence that the administration
did all it could to avoid such a disaster, even though that position
is not supported by the facts. So the victims of 9/11 did not hear an
apology from her.
The President tells us that he is a compassionate conservative, and
that he and his staff pray a lot. Yet, asking for forgiveness for wrongdoing
is apparently not part of their faith-based orientation.