Why can’t governments apologize?
Why is it that governments have so much trouble admitting that they’ve made mistakes? Let’s take the U.S. government, for example. Right now we have troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. We don’t seem to be achieving our goals or be welcome in either place. Why can’t we apologize sincerely and go home?
In Afghanistan the U.S. spent a huge amount of effort trying to thwart Soviet control in the late 1970s. Jimmy Carter sent all kinds of money and weapons to the Islamic rebels so that they could kill Russian kids in uniform. In retrospect this seems like a bad mistake. If the Afghanistan had been a Russian possession there would never have been a Taliban and perhaps never an Osama bin-Laden or September 11th. Could we offer a sincere apology today to the Russians and offer Afghanistan back to them?
Saddam Hussein seems to be alive and well. The Iraqi people don’t like us, if newspaper articles and armed resistance are to be believed. Why not say to Saddam “We were wrong about your weapons programs and we’re sorry for invading and here’s your country back?” Our troops could get on planes in Baghdad and wave goodbye to a restored Saddam. (We might want to split off an area in the north and give it to the Kurds since we made them some promises back in the early 1990s and it would be good to keep them.)
[We could warm up by apologizing to the Vietnamese: “We’re sorry that we got involved in your civil war. We know that we can’t truly make it up to you but if you’re in the U.S. we’ll treat you to a three-day pass at Disneyworld and a day at Universal Islands of Adventure.”]
Governments do this with wrongly convicted criminals. We say “Sorry for your 15 years in jail. We didn’t have DNA testing back then. Enjoy the rest of your life.” Why not do this in foreign policy instead of trying to come up with contorted ex-post-facto justifications?
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