On the Opinion Section of The Wall Street Journal today, there is a piece that is critical of John Kerry’s claims that he would fight the war in Iraq with more “competence.” The article basically states that wars never go as planned, hard decisions need to be made, and mistakes happen. It then warns Americans to be wary of politicians who promise more “competent” leadership.
The Wall Street Journal is wrong.
One part of the opinion piece reads as follows:
“Certainly the Bush Administration has made mistakes, as these columns have noted along the way. The CIA failed to anticipate the Baathist strategy of yielding the war conventionally in order to wage it later unconventionally. Stopping the Marine advance in Fallujah last April sent a message of hesitation this is only now being corrected. Muqtada al-Sadr’s career ought to have been ended when he was an upstart; today he’s an untouchable. The political handover should have happened much sooner than it did, and we should have trained more Iraqis to fight by our side before the war. And so on.”
The very next paragraph begins with these words:
“Yet to acknowledge these blunders in hindsight doesn’t mean anyone else would have done better.”
The key phrase in that sentence is “to acknowledge these blunders.” That, I submit, is the real downfall of this Administration. President Bush and his Administration never acknowledge making mistakes. In fact, Bush admits that even with hindsight, he wouldn’t change his decisions regarding Iraq.
While I admire Bush’s single-minded determination to win the war, I question following a leader who never admits making a mistake. People learn by making mistakes, by failing a task. Only then do we find out how to succeed. Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
The Wall Street Journal article goes on to show that war is a tough business and argues that bad decisions and failure tend to precede good results.
“During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln hired, then cashiered, Generals Scott, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade before settling on Grant. That took about two years, during which the catastrophes of Bull Run (Union casualties: 2,896), Fredericksburg (13,353) and Chancellorsville (18,400) intervened. How’s that for poor Presidential personnel choices leading to unnecessary loss of life?”
Again, the Journal misses the point. Abraham Lincoln admitted that he’d made a mistake with the Generals that he sacked. He recognized that his choices weren’t getting the job done and replaced them. He didn’t just push forward and declare that the Union was winning the war, despite the clear facts before him that things were in chaos.
And what about this argument that in war “bad decisions and failure tend to precede good” decisions? Tell that to the 58,245 men and women listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. You remember Vietnam don’t you — where one bad decision led to another and another. It could be argued that the only “good decision” in that war is when we decided to bring our remaining troops home.
I don’t claim to know whether or not Senator Kerry will be a more “competent” leader in the war in Iraq, but it appears he’ll at least be able to admit when some decision is wrong, when some strategy doesn’t seem to be working. In this unconventional war on terror, I think Abraham Lincoln would consider that to be a good thing.