IN THE NEWS
Suppose you have a neighbor whom everyone on your block has good reason to believe is dangerous. He drinks heavily, then gets into nearly-incomprehensible shouting matches with his neighbors over imagined slights. He talks in vague terms about how he's going to get the respect he deserves. You've become a particular target for this person, ever since the day you called the police when you heard him smashing every breakable object in his house. You now get threatening messages pushed into your mailbox, written anonymously, but obviously from him.
The police are supposed to be keeping an eye on your neighbor. Unfortunately, that didn't stop him from trying to shoot you when you were unloading the groceries from your car earlier today. When the police showed up, they shrugged, saying there was little they could have done to prevent the incident. Now, the situation really gets ugly: they can't find the gun he used, and no one else was a witness. The confrontation with you neighbor will have to escalate. You don't exactly feel safe--particularly since, before today, you haven't seen one patrol car go by his house, or one police officer stop by to check up on things.
You call the police department to complain about their lax approach to this threat. If the desk sergeant on the other end of the line were to say, "Gosh, you have to give us the benefit of the doubt on police matters," I can bet what your reaction might be.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the line that Tony Snow, White House press secretary, took during today's questions about North Korea. Snow went even further, claiming that any question of whether the Bush Administration could have done a better job at deterring the North Koreans was "silly."
Let's compare this incident to how another President handled a clear foreign policy failure. John F. Kennedy had to face the music on the Bay of Pigs invasion. Not only did the Cuban army crush the small force of anti-Castro exiles, at a time when Cold War tensions about Communist penetration into the Western hemisphere was at an all-time high, but the public would soon learn that the Kennedy Administration had lied about the US government's backing of this misconceived operation.
Kennedy's first response was a speech to the American Association of Newspaper Editors (click here for the audio, and here for a transcript). Barely three months in office, the new president hardly tucked his tail between his legs. He did, however, admit that the US government could and would endure failures during the Cold War:
We intend to profit from this lesson. We intend to re-examine and reorient our forces of all kinds-cur tactics and our institutions here in this community. We intend to intensify our efforts for a struggle in many ways more difficult than war, where disappointment will often accompany us.
The next day, during a press conference, Kennedy was more forthright into taking responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. "There's an old saying,'" Kennedy said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan. . . . I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."
It wasn't a perfect admission of failure, and it was a while before Americans heard the complete, ugly story about the Bay of Pigs. It was, however, a critical moment, when Kennedy took responsibility from that point forward. (Later, some of the top officials behind the secret planning and support for the Bay of Pigs operation, such as CIA Director Allen Dulles, lost their jobs because of this fiasco.)
Rather than lambasting him for his failure, many Americans--including some likely critics--respected Kennedy for taking immediate responsibility. His willingness to be accountable made it easier to give him the benefit of the doubt in future foreign policy crises, such as the Berlin confrontation and the Cuban Missile Crisis. However frightening or uncertain events looked at the moment, someone nominally in charge accepted that he was really in charge.
Kim Jong Il is just as reprehensible as Stalin or Khrushchev. The presidents who oppose him have to be just as willing to be held accountable as their predecessors. As Kennedy showed, American presidents receive the benefit of the doubt after they have appeared to accept the mantle of responsibility.
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