Lack of Progress

[billroper]

The thing that saddens me most about the election tomorrow is that I see people -- who I like -- posting things that are patently untrue, things that are echoes of things that were said about a person that I suspect that they revere, the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Certainly there were many people who felt that he would do anything to get us into World War II, up to and including lying about foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.

And despite anything bad that the current President may have done, nothing that he has done quite compares to herding the entire population of American citizens of Japanese descent in the Western United States into detainment camps. Yeah, I know we'd all agree now that what he did then was a pretty bad thing, but some things are easier to figure out from a distance than they are at the time that you're doing them.

And who could argue with the idea that the right thing to do was to go to war to remove a crazed dictator who was murdering tens of thousands of his own citizens? The biggest question, I suspect, in either case ought to be, "What took you so long to save us?", a question that we might well be correctly putting to the United Nations on the subject of Darfur.

Governments are made up of imperfect men and they will make mistakes.

So will the rest of us.

And maybe some time in the next 75 years, we'll figure out how to do it better. God knows, we haven't figured it out yet.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"It's certainly possible to choose not to do something that is right, because the cost of doing the right thing is too high. And that can be a rational decision."

It's the kind of decision we all make, all of the time, although we don't like to think of it that way.

"I agree that we would not have gone to war with Iraq if we had known that they did not have WMD."

How does this jive with the comment I just responded to, where you claimed I was misremembering history by saying the WMD was the primary justification for going to Iraq. We either went to war because of WMDs or we went to war to liberate the Iraqi people.

"With reference to your comment about our intelligence agencies, it seems clear to me that having bad intelligence is damned expensive, no matter how much you have to spend to get good intelligence. Good intelligence has probably got to be less expensive than any of the figures that you quote above on the cost of this war."

Certainly. I'd even argue that bad intelligence is actually more expensive than no intelligence. Although I certainly wouldn't call the pre-war Iraqi intelligence "bad." The intelligence agencies had it right, but political motivations took precidence. If bad intelligence is worse than no intelligence, then cooked intelligence is even worse than bad intelligence.