One of the planners of the Iraq war, Douglas Feith has a book coming out (ht: TPM).  The Washington Post has a story about it today.

      The problem for Feith is: how do you rationalize what has obviously become a policy failure of world historic proportions?  Instead of serious engagement with the idea that invading Iraq and his own planning was fundamentally flawed, he does what so many failed historical actors do: blame someone else:

Although he acknowledges "serious errors" in intelligence, policy and
operational plans surrounding the invasion, Feith blames them on others
outside the Pentagon
and notes that "even the best planning" cannot avoid all problems in
wartime. While he says the decision to invade was correct, he judges
that the task of creating a viable and stable Iraqi government was
poorly executed and remains "grimly incomplete."

       He was a Pentagon guy, a DoD planner, and he seem quite unwilling to turn his critical gaze inward. No, it was others – the State Department, people on the ground in Iraq, bureaucrats, Democrats, liberals, anyone but himself the the Pentagon and Vice Presidential hawks who bear so much of the responsibility for the horrific and deadly failure of the war.

     Makes me think of Mao.  When Peng Dehuai brought news, in 1959, that the Great Leap Forward was failing, Mao rejected him and doggedly demanded that the Party stay with the deeply injurious policy.  Most of the deaths of the Great Leap came after that time.  It was one of the very worst disasters of the disastrous twentieth century.  But as Party leaders gradually came to see the truth that Peng had warned them of, and as they slowly moved away from the insane communalism, did Mao see the error of his ways?  No.  He blamed the bureaucrats and the people in the Party "taking the capitalist road" (as if Liu Shaoqi could ever have been a capitalist) for the Great Leap’s failure.  And so he thrust the country into the Cultural Revolution, another national calamity. 

      How is Feith like Mao?  It’s all about ideology.  About adhering to an idea, a theory, a policy, regardless of reality.  Mao rejected reality and pressed China into the worst of the Great Leap and the craziness of the Cultural Revolution.  Feith rejected reality and pressed on with the invasion of Iraq, believing that the aftermath would be easy and that politics would simply follow from the military logic.  But he, just like Mao, was wrong.  And no number of pages of self-serving autobiography will change that.

      There is another way, of course.  The way that Mencius counseled.  When something goes wrong, Mencius tells us, the first question to ask is: what did I do?  How did I contribute to the problem?  How can I change myself to create a better solution?  Here he is, standing up to a powerful king, challenging authority with righteousness:

Mencius went to P’ing Lu and said to the governor there: "If you had a spearman who abandoned his post three times in a single day would you discharge him or not?"

"I wouldn’t wait for three times," replied Governor K’ung Chu-hsin.

"But you have abandoned you own post many times," countered Mencius.  "In years of clamity and failed harvests, how many thousands of your people suffered – young and old alike abandoned to gutters and ditches, the strong scattered to every corner of the land?"

"But there was nothing I could do." [replied the governor]

"Suppose someone entrusted their cattle and sheep to your care.  Surely you would try to find grass and hay for them.  And if you couldn’t find any, would you return them to their owner or just stand by and watch them die?"

"So, I myself am to blame." [replied the governor]

     Feith does not have that kind of inner strength or dignity or integrity or humanity.  He is unable to say what must be said: that he himself is to blame.