The Accountability Act

I was looking at The Washington Post of April 25, 1961. The Page 1 headline reads, "Kennedy Takes Blame for U.S. Role in Cuba Invasion" -- the debacle at the Bay of Pigs. The president did this, The Post reported, after his secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, tried to pass some of the blame on to the preceding Eisenhower administration. JFK quickly intervened: The buck stopped with him.

Because almost everything Kennedy did has been emulated by his successors, we have had a succession of faux-macho blame-taking. Probably the most preposterous was the responsibility that Ronald Reagan took for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which claimed 241 lives. The inadequate security procedures, the president falsely asserted, were his fault. No, he was responsible for the policy, not for manning the perimeter.

In Reagan's case, he was clearly trying to end matters -- close the case, move on. I had the same sense with Donald Rumsfeld's apology-cum-assumption-of-blame for what had gone wrong at that prison in Iraq. He was sorry it happened, sorry he had been slow to appreciate how immense the scandal would become and, in case you want to know, responsible in an official sort of way for the abuses.

Rumsfeld is nothing if not smart. He knows what he is responsible for -- and it is not personnel practices and interrogation procedures. It's easy and facile to both apologize and take the blame for them, because they ain't his baby to begin with. What is his baby, though, is the airy dismissal he and others in the Bush administration have given to the Geneva Conventions and the insistence on invading and occupying Iraq with an insufficient number of troops.

But these are the areas where Rumsfeld and his boss, the president, reject blame and responsibility. They were -- and remain -- wrong on so much that has happened in Iraq that they have defied the law of averages. The United States invaded with too few troops. It could not secure the country or even its own supply lines. It found no weapons of mass destruction. It unnecessarily alienated allies. It offended the Muslim world. It precipitously disbanded the Baath Party and the Iraqi army and now would like to have some of that undone.

What happened at Abu Ghraib prison is abhorrent, appalling, inhuman, counterproductive -- everything everyone says it is. But it was -- and remains -- inevitable. It's not just the sort of thing bad people do because they are bad but what good people do when a liberation becomes an occupation.

It is what happens when the occupiers begin to fear the occupied, when the oppressor demonizes the oppressed and, of course, when untrammeled power is instantaneously bestowed on the usually powerless. It is what happens when authority looks the other way or, as in the case of Nazi Germany, orders the abuse in the first place. If we have learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil.

Abu Ghraib was just history waiting to repeat itself. It is the French in Algeria and Indochina. It is the British in an empire where the sun never set, or, in the case of Northern Ireland, seemed not to have risen in the first place.

It is what America did in Vietnam and, before that, anywhere in Central America or the Caribbean where, for the good of the natives, we brought freedom to their shores. Once upon a time, the Army treated American Indians in a horrendous fashion, but that was because they, too, did not for some reason want to be occupied.

For the consequences of a wrongheaded policy, Rumsfeld and all the other Bushies will not apologize. Nor will they take responsibility. They exist in a dream world, a corporate suite of yes men, where the end of the war was visualized as the Baghdad version of Pasadena's Tournament of Roses -- our boys might fall, but only from allergic reactions to all those flowers. The administration listened to Iraqi exiles who, putting Max Bialystock to shame, produced an entire war so that they could get back into business. Mel Brooks would be speechless.

It is a joke, this business of taking responsibility and blame. The way it's done in Washington amounts to just the opposite -- not taking responsibility and not accepting blame. This is what Donald Rumsfeld did, to the evident satisfaction of his boss.

JFK, a man of some discernment, would recognize this for what it is: farce.

cohenr@washpost.com