"Avoiding embarrassment" vs. repentance

The disaffection most have with the war, I suspect, has to do with the sense of embarrassment with how the war is being conducted, not with that it was undertaken in the first place. A colleague of mine opined, a couple months ago, that it “would be nice if the United States could get out of Iraq without too much egg on its face.” To his shock, I replied that the United States needs to experience as much “egg on its face” as possible. Since those who orchestrated, directed, and cheered on this criminal act will never be held to account for their wrongdoing in any meaningful way, they ought to at least suffer public humiliation for their behavior. To fail to see the moral implications of what America has become, to regard the deaths of over one million innocent Iraqis – if one includes the half-million children who died from earlier U.S. embargoes on food and medicine – as nothing more than a failure of “intelligence” or “poor planning” or “mismanagement,” is symptomatic of the moral and spiritual pathology of a once-great nation.

~ Butler Shaffer