WAR MISTAKES

Admitting the obvious never seemed so important as when President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair last week conceded they had made substantial errors in the Iraq war. President Bush’s new course, from what previously was a mild recognition of repaired mistakes, helps him by removing specific issues from the national debate about the war. But the largest issue, whether the war is being fought in a way that can produce success for the new Iraqi government as well as for the United States and Britain, is far from answered.

For Mr. Bush, the errors he mentioned were his swagger – the “bring it on” and Osama bin Laden “dead or alive” – and the tragedy of Abu Ghraib prison. For Mr. Blair, it was the de-Baathification of Iraqi security. Fine.

If the public wondered whether these two leaders ever heard their critics make these same observations months or years ago, now it knows – they did and they were willing to respond.

But if the investigation into the suspected killing by Marines of 24 unarmed civilians in Haditha turns out to be true, will this be another example of an official mistake too? Or will the president probe deeper into the causes that prompted the well-trained Marines last November apparently to avenge the death of one of their group by killing the civilians over five or six hours? And then there is the charge of a cover-up of the killings, also being investigated.

In April, when seven retired generals urged that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld be fired, a couple of them cited incompetence specifically, all of them implied it.

In a Time magazine piece, Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold (ret.) described some of the missteps in the war: “the distortion of intelligence in the buildup to the war, McNamara-like micromanagement that kept our forces from having enough resources to do the job, the failure to retain and reconstitute the Iraqi military in time to help quell civil disorder, the initial denial that an insurgency was the heart of the opposition to occupation, alienation of allies who could have helped in a more robust way to rebuild Iraq and the continuing failure of the other agencies of our government to commit assets to the same degree as the Defense Department.”

The president or the prime minister can appear before the public and, taking advantage of a well-placed question from the press, acknowledge individual mistakes. But it is the totality of mistakes that matters even more, the accumulation of error that unfairly burdens the military and leaves the public wondering whether the war can be won. No one or two errors are responsible for that.