Mistakes Don't Matter?

Secretary of State Condi Rice got in trouble on her recent visit to Britain, where she told reporters that in Iraq "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure."

The media and blogosphere immediately jumped on the "thousands of errors" comment, but I think Rice's next point is the really telling one: "But when you look back in history what will be judged on is" whether the "right strategic decision" was made. Rice tried to clarify the whole thing the next day by adding, "The point I was making... is that, of course, if you've ever made decisions, you've undoubtedly made mistakes in the decisions that you've made, but that the important thing is to get the big strategic decisions right and that I am confident that the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein and give the Iraqi people an opportunity for peace and democracy is the right decision."

The argument that execution is irrelevant and only the concept matters seems strange to me. I immediately thought of a doctor reassuring the family of a dead patient, "Yes, we operated incorrectly, we operated on the wrong part of the body, hell, we botched the whole procedure and killed the patient. But we were right in thinking the operation was called for!"

Success requires the right concept and the right execution. That Rice, like the negligent doctor in my hypothetical, feels compelled to fall back solely on the arguable correctness of the diagnosis is hard to understand. Does she really believe concept is all that matters? Does she expect the country to believe it? I don't know.

But if you found yourself concerned by Rice's comments, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the scene the next day to reassure you: "...the enemy's got a brain; the enemy watches what you do and then adjusts to that, so you have to constantly adjust and change your tactics, your techniques and your procedures," Rumsfeld explained. "If someone says, well, that's a tactical mistake, then I guess it's a lack of understanding, at least my understanding, of what warfare is about."

So Rice says we've made thousands of mistakes, but none of them matter because we were right in deciding that Hussein had to go. And Rumsfeld says we haven't made any mistakes at all.

There's a word for all this: denial. And denial, as Dave Grossman says, has no survival value.

If you weren't sure before how our effort in Iraq was going to turn out, Rice and Rumsfeld just told you all you need to know.