"The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse. Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that. One finds identical excuses for each contemporary American disaster. Robert Gibbs just invoked the same false excuse: that "nobody" knew the depth of the financial and unemployment crisis early last year."
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I like Norm Geras' take on Greenwald's piece.
ReplyDeleteThey are that sure of the transparency of the truth about the future of Iraq, and yet such people are rather more circumspect in sharing with the rest of us what the consequences would have been of leaving Saddam in power. Come on, Glenn, don't be shy. If, as you say, 'They could have known. And should have known. They chose not to', just give us the low-down on what the truth would have been for Iraq today with the Baathist regime left in place in 2003. This truth too, presumably, must already have been available to you back then.
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/09/the-truth-and-iraq.html