So, a while back, the noted NeoConservative, Max Boot (what a name), wrote the following:
I wrote: “No matter how strongly I come out against Trump… it is never enough for the most doctrinaire leftists who seem to think that no step short, perhaps, of ritual suicide will atone for my ‘war crimes.’” Exhibit A. Intolerance & self righteousness isn’t a good look. https://t.co/F0AorG1ddJ
— Max Boot (@MaxBoot) October 13, 2018
What does it take to atone for a mistake in public policy?
Let me suggest the following:
- Admit the mistake?
- Reassess the reasoning and argument that led to your support, so that you won’t make the same mistake again?
There are major public intellectuals who are wrong about, well, everything. (Thomas Friedman, take a bow.)
One of the largest mistakes of the past twenty years was supporting the Iraq War. It accomplished none of what it was supposed to, killed a pile of people, and weakened the United States. (I’m OK with it weakening the US, but American pundits who believe in a strong US probably shouldn’t be.)
It was, also, yes, a massive war crime–exactly the same war crime for which most Nazis were hung at Nuremburg (no, they mostly weren’t hung for the Holocaust).
So if you were foolish enough, or evil enough, or stupid enough to advocate for the war, and you want to be taken seriously in the future, you need to show that you now know you were wrong AND that you wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
This, by the way, is why I was unwilling to endorse Hilary Clinton in 2016: Because Libya showed that, even though she said she knew the Iraq war was a mistake, she hadn’t actually learned. She went and did it again, though fortunately at a somewhat lesser scale (not that that’s any comfort to those Libyans whose lives were destroyed, or the people being sold in Libyan slave markets today).
But let’s leave aside Iraq, Clinton, and the wonderfully-named Mr. Max Boot.
This rule works for all mistakes. It isn’t enough to admit you made a mistake, you have to understand why you made the mistake and be determined not to make that same mistake.
Merely apologizing, or knowing you made a mistake is worthless if you would do the same thing again.
This is true in our small personal lives, as well as in the big, public mistakes important people make.
None of this should be controversial: This is kindergarten-level ethics. This is the sort of thing children are taught: To understand why they made a mistake and to change their thinking so they won’t make it again.
Iraq was more than a mistake, of course, and the best way to make sure it wouldn’t happen again would be to try the war criminals who made the decisions (including voting for it) and either putting them in prison or hanging them from the neck. Because I generally oppose the death penalty, I’ll settle for sending them to maximum-security prison to do hard time, as is appropriate for people as dangerous as mass murderers.
But because, instead, the people behind the Iraq War and other horrible decisions (like all the decisions leading up to catastrophic climate change) have been rewarded, they, of course, have kept committing crimes and “mistakes.”
Not sending everyone involved in Watergate to prison was a mistake, with the pardoning of Nixon being the original sin here. The same people involved in Watergate (minus Nixon, of course) were involved in Iran/Contra, and then they were the people involved in Iraq.
Hilary Clinton and George W. Bush (whom, I notice, Democrats have rehabilitated) are monstrous war criminals who should be in prison. Max Boot is an enabler of war crimes.
At the very least such people need to show that they understand what they did was wrong, and that they have changed and won’t do it again.
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