by George Packer
from The New Yorker Magazine Online

Why has it become impossible to admit a mistake in Washington and accept the consequences? The last time a senior government official quit over his own job failure was more than twenty years ago, when Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s national’security adviser, resigned during the Iran-Contra scandal and, taking accountability to a Roman level, swallowed an overdose of Valium, out of “a sense of having failed the country.” (He survived.) Today, this mostly forgotten act of personal responsibility seems rather heroic. Recent years have seen such a steep decline in shame that a book like George Tenet’s “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” for which the author was paid four million dollars, has become an expected destination at the end of a well-trodden path that leads from disaster through obfuscation and defiance to a well-rewarded self-justification.

The Bush Administration has come close to perfecting the art of unaccountability. Tenet’s memoir shows just one of several styles of evasion lately on display: last month, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s admission that mistakes were made in the firing of eight United States attorneys had the air of a schoolboy hoping that bogus contrition would get him off the hook. “I accept full responsibility,” he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning only that he was sorry he had allowed the matter to become such a nuisance. He spent the next five hours explaining-through repeated memory failure and a steady refusal to acknowledge the contradictions and lies in which he kept entangling himself-why he bore no responsibility for anything else. Afterward, the President praised Gonzales for his “very candid assessment” and said that it “increased my confidence in his ability to do the job.” This is unaccountability as pure chutzpah, and so far it seems to be working.

Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank president and former Deputy Secretary of Defense, in answering charges that he favored his girlfriend by giving her a promotion and a hefty pay raise at the bank while holding impoverished countries to a high standard of good government, has taken a different approach. Wolfowitz, in his most recent statement, prepared for an investigatory panel, conceded nothing, and denounced a “smear campaign” waged by his enemies inside the bank. “I acted transparently, sought and received guidance from the bank’s ethics committee, and conducted myself in good faith in accordance with that guidance,” he asserted. Assertion is the neoconservative style of avoiding accountability: don-t give an inch or they-ll tear you to pieces. Wolfowitz’s ally Richard Perle once said that to express public doubts about the Iraq war “would be fatal.” And, of course, the World Bank scandal is all about Iraq.

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