Miscalculation

In today's New York Times is a report of an interview with the President, in which he acknowledges that he made a "miscalculation of what the conditions would be'' in post-war Iraq.

Miscalculation? Miscalculation!?

I'm sure that'll be a comfort to all those grieving families out there, both American and Iraqi. "Sorry, honey, Daddy won't be coming home, because the President made a miscalculation."

Let's think about this for a moment. War is unpredictable, mistakes are made and good men die. We all know this. But we accept that in a "just" war, these things will happen. It's regrettable, but unavoidable. In the service of a just cause, we make sacrifices. But what makes this different, and, to my mind, morally culpable, is that we didn't have to be in this war. It wasn't a just cause.

If we accept that "after 9/11, everything is different", and that the Bush "pre-emptive war" doctrine is going to be our policy, then we need to think about this moral dimension. If we are not at war because we have been attacked, if we go to war when, as it turns out, we couldn't even have been attacked by the country we're invading, then where is the justification for those lost lives? The President made a mistake? If we've given the President that much power, don't we have a right to demand a more pains-taking "calculation" process than we saw with Iraq? What right does the President have to MAKE a miscalculation like that? What are we paying him for!?

You know, it's really too bad we don't have a department in our government which has the job of learning all about foreign countries, and talking with their people, which could maybe have set up a bunch of meetings with academic experts and other knowledgeable people, and issue a report to provide the President with an accurate picture, to avoid miscalculations just like this. Since it would focus on dealings with other sovereign states, maybe we could call it, oh, the State Department? Oh. Wait. We did. And they did. So it wasn't even like he would have had to get over his problem with reading newspapers to get the idea that maybe Iraq would be a messy proposition. Though why he should have paid attention to it when he wouldn't even listen to his own Daddy's perspective on the issue during the war in Kuwait, I guess I can't say. And I'll spare you the list of all the others he should have been listening to, beyond the US Army War College. Oh, and also General Shinseki.

My point is this: Iraq was a miscalculation in a situation where we shouldn't allow the President to miscalculate. This isn't an unemployment number, or an economic growth rate. These are real dead bodies and broken families we are talking about. What makes it worse is the plentiful evidence that it was a willful miscalculation, that he, or the people shaping his information inputs, ignored plentiful evidence that would have resulted in a different calculation. And further, when it started to become obvious that his calculation was badly awry, he did very little to correct the situation. And people are still dying. Every day. Every day.

With great power comes great responsibility. Mr. Bush seems happy with the power part, it's the responsibility he has trouble with. It seems to me that we can't allow that to continue. For making a miscalculation like that, he must be fired.