Don’t Apologize, Act

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 | Obama and the Dems

Here is a comment published in a British newspaper yesterday (Guardian p26), it was attributed to Judith Miller, but I think it was probably first penned by Clive Stafford Smith earlier this summer in relation to the alleged torture of prisoners:

Obama tells the world that we should ‘look forward, not backwards.’ The slogan is bizarre. How should the victim feel when we tell him that we are going to look only forward? We won’t admit what we did to him, and we won’t even say we’re sorry?

Something about the quote grates against me. On one hand it reads like just another liberal gagging to flaunt their left-wing credentials, but on the other hand it feels like an intentional mis-reading of Obama and American politics.

Often the liberal knee-jerk reaction is to immediately fly into the victim defence stance (”how should the victim feel”) on all things political. But this simply misses the fact that Obama, like most people, does look to the past to guide his decisions. Take Healthcare reform for example: he consciously sought to avoid a repeat of Clinton’s folly and arguably took into account that the “victim” in that case (the congressional sense of pride) needed to be dealt with softly next time around.

Likewise, it is difficult to say Obama is oblivious to victims when he authorizes billions of dollars in economic supports, tries to pull out of Iraq, looks to shut-down Gitmo, toys with criminal charges for military interrogators and so forth.

Obama occasionally says sorry when he missteps (as when he cracked a few jokes about the special Olympics), but why should he apologize for the actions of the previous administration? Despite attacks during the presidential campaign that Obama would be all talk and no action, we have seen him quickly correct many of the faults of the last administration.

Even as he vowed to shut-down Gitmo on his second day in office he has sought to change the ethos of prison in the remaining months of its operations. In fact a recent article about Gitmo by a journalist who toured the facility declares it “a model” detention centre, and comments that one of the biggest problems there is not torture but rather that the inmates are becoming obese.

To this end “looking forward” means that Obama can distance himself from the traumas of Bush and correct those past problems. But to begin apologizing for past transgressions is stupid. How does one pick and choose what is worth an apologetic oration and what is not? The oval office as an alter of repentance? If the West wing suddenly had all of America’s dirty laundry flapping in the wind, how could one expect to win the political allies necessary to make change?

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