Those Who Don't Investigate the Past Are Doomed to Repeat It
The U.S. government has rejected the chance to study this year's insurrection. They'll soon regret the decision.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a day and a half on board the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt as it conducted exercises off the coast of Florida in preparation for an extended deployment. It was a fascinating experience, and one of the activities that impressed me most was watching night landings by the ship's F-18 squadron. An especially interesting part, at least for me, was observing the debriefing each pilot had to undergo after every flight, in which members of the crew went over each landing and explained what the pilot had done correctly and what needed to be improved. The purpose of these sessions was clear: To maintain a high level of performance, you had to learn from any mistakes you made so you could do better in the future.
I thought of that experience as I read about the Republican Party's successful effort to prevent Congress from creating an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. As shocking as the initial attack was, the GOP's campaign to keep the American people from learning from the experience was, if anything, more disturbing. They were obviously worried an investigation might cast an unfavorable light on their party—and especially on the former president, who egged on the invaders—and they'd prefer the country as a whole never knows exactly what happened on that day or why.
One of the supposed strengths of democracies is their tolerance for open discussion, which makes it easier to identify mistakes, alter course, and hold those responsible accountable. But that self-correcting capacity is being eroded these days—and not just here in the United States. In Hungary, for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party has systematically strangled independent media, imposed its own authority over the judiciary, forced its best university—the Central European University—to relocate to Vienna, and is now centralizing its control over the rest of Hungarian academia. Open debate and honest inquiry are no longer welcome. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has followed a similar playbook for years, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his followers have shown a similar unwillingness to acknowledge unpleasant truths, admit mistakes, or learn from past experiences.
Things are somewhat better here in the United States, but its reluctance to analyze its own errors in a candid and tough-minded way is still a problem. Remember the much ballyhooed 9/11 Commission? Its final report contained a riveting narrative of the 9/11 plot but declined to pass judgment on any of the officials personally accountable for even so much as a lapse in judgment. There has been no official effort to assess the fateful decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or to take stock of the many strategy, judgment, and assessment errors that led to the subsequent failures there and in Afghanistan, along with the misleading reports of "progress" Americans were repeatedly subjected to. The U.S. Defense Department did investigate the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, but these efforts focused solely on local commanders or enlisted personnel and not on civilian officials whose policies made the abuses far more likely. The New York Times correctly judged the Army Inspector General's report on Abu Ghraib to be a "300-page whitewash," and Human Rights Watch called it out for avoiding "the logical conclusion that high-level military and civilian officials should be investigated for their role."
Similarly, former U.S. President Barack Obama chose not to investigate the George W. Bush administration's use of torture (in violation of both domestic and international law), and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr went to some lengths to undermine the investigation into former U.S. President Donald Trump's own presidential misconduct. Efforts to teach a more complete and accurate history of racial injustice in the United States now face growing backlash intended not to correct historical errors or offer a fair-minded critique of so-called "critical race theory" but rather to sugarcoat a history that some Americans would prefer to ignore. How much do you want to bet there will never be a Challenger-style inquiry to figure out what the United States did wrong—and also what it did right—in responding to a pandemic that killed more Americans than World War I and II combined?...
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