Open Letter to the White House - Responsibility

Dear Mr. President:

I've written you a great deal, one way and another, about responsibility over the last few years. Lord knows, I've tried to educate you as to what that word means, and about the consequences of taking genuine responsibility for our actions. I've told you over and over again that taking responsibility is not a mere rhetorical device, but a true philosophical stand we take that affects both our view of the past and our future actions. I must give it up as a bad job. Your latest speech makes it abundantly clear - you neither know nor care what responsibility is.


I'm an optimist, so I'll try this one more time. When you say, of the decision to go to war in Iraq, that "much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," and that "I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," that means, sir, that your decision was based on false premises and was therefore the wrong decision. You cannot, a mere few minutes later, turn around and declare "My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct one," and "Saddam was a threat," and expect to be taken seriously. The statements are mutually contradictory. They cannot all be true.

At the very least, when you say that you are responsible for the chain of events that led to a wrong decision, it is absurd to then claim that your future actions will not change. The statement that you are responsible for an error implies, logically, that your previous course of action was based on a false assumption. By insisting, after acknowledging an error, that you will continue to do the same thing you're doing now, you imply either that the error was not a serious one, or that your acknowledgment of responsibility means nothing at all. If the first, you had no reason to construct a major address around a minor mistake; if the second, you display a cynicism and depravity that I think would shame a robber of old-age pensions or panhandler's coins.

You recently insisted that you don't live in a bubble. Mr. President, I wish to God you did. It would be better than having a president who lives in the reflection of a funhouse mirror.