Emotional rescue
Blogging was down for 3 days while Salon moved its offices -- from floor
number 16 to floor number 11 of the same building. The move signified
nothing other than a convenience between us and our landlord, but the box
that hosts my Radio Userland was offline all weekend.
Back to the world, now! Jeff Jarvis quoted my post on Clarke's apology
to the 9/11 commission and commented:
| | Oh, fercrhissake, this is not
about feelings! This is about life and death! This is about finding bad
guys and killing them before they kill us. Enough with apologies and
emotions and psyches. This is war. Let's go win it. |
But surely war is one of the most emotionally intense experiences
humankind has created. And how can we talk about "life and death" as if
there are no "feelings" involved? What could be more emotional? I
really don't get the objection -- unless it stems from a generic attitude
that "talking about feelings is for wimps," which I think is beneath
Jarvis.
There is a direct connection between the ability to handle emotions
healthily and the ability to win a war. (Why do you think the U.S. armed
forces devote so much energy and time toward trying to cope with stress,
trauma and the awful emotional toll of combat?) Clarke's apology was so
powerful because it opened a door leading beyond the grief over 9/11 that
so many still feel -- a door that the Bush administration has resolutely
kept closed. If we're fighting a war to win, and we're still a democracy,
then tending the national psyche remains an important part of the
president's portfolio.
One of the psychological values of admitting error, of course, is that
only after you've admitted that you made a mistake can you begin to learn
from it. No one in his right mind, Richard Clarke included, believes that
the Bush administration averted its gaze from specific, detailed
intelligence it could have used to save the World Trade Center. (This is
why the president's rebuttal -- "had my administration had any information
that terrorists were going to attack New York City on Sept. 11, we would
have acted" -- is so off-the-point.) It's very clear now that the Bush
administration failed to make fighting Al-Qaida terrorism a priority before
9/11. And, really, that's okay; it was a new administration, it was bound
to make some goofs, and the disaster of 9/11 could have happened on any
president's watch.
That doesn't mean Bush couldn't have stepped forward and admitted the
obvious -- that 9/11 represented a colossal failure of the American
government to protect the American people. How could it not be? And why is
it so hard just to say so and move on? Why did it take 2 1/2 years for
any official to be able to bring him or herself to the point of
uttering this plain fact?
The problem with the Bush gang's refusal to take any responsibility for
its failures is not simply that it has hindered us from putting the ghosts
of 9/11 to rest; it's that, as Josh Marshall points out here
-- it made it impossible for them to learn from their mistakes:
| | Screw-ups happen; mistakes
happen. What is inexcusable is the inability, indeed the refusal, to
learn from them. Rather than adjust to this different reality, on September
12th, the Bush war cabinet set about using 9/11 -- exploiting it, really --
to advance an agenda which had, in fact, been largely discredited by
9/11. They shoe-horned everything they'd been trying to do before the
attacks into the new boots of 9/11. And the fit was so bad they had to
deceive the public and themselves to do it. |
So I think it's awfully simplistic to just say, "this is about finding
bad guys and killing them before they kill us", and banish the very subject
of emotions from the table. The most fervent theorists of the war on terror
insist that it is a vast, complex global chess game spanning continents and
decades. Painful as it is to accept this, they are probably right.
If it were just a matter of "finding bad guys and killing them," maybe
we wouldn't have to worry about messy things like the morale of the
American people. But Bush's failure of moral leadership has actually made
it harder for the U.S. to maintain the will it needs in this fight.
Clarke's apology took one step toward correcting that. Bush will never
understand this, but Clarke was, in an obtuse way, helping the president.
UPDATE: Jarvis responds here. Good heated discussion in the comments there, too.
AND MORE: Chris Nolan has further comments as well.
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