Why No Remorse Over Useless Wars?

I’ve been asked why government officials feel no remorse over leading the country into useless and costly wars.

To show remorse, you first have to have a conscience, or one that is in working condition, not dead, deadened or annulled by long years in government office and positions of power. You have to feel something for people and their lives, Americans and non-Americans alike. You have to get the facts and assess them with objectivity or be made to realize what you have done. You cannot come to believe in the lies you have been feeding the public. You cannot keep rationalizing your decisions. You have to realize that what you did was wrong. You have to want forgiveness. You have to figure that a public airing  of the wrong is a good thing. You have to have the courage to expose your decision or those of others who share power. You have to place a greater value on truth than on secrecy, power, the maintenance of power, and the imagined or misperceived good results of the acts that demand remorse. You have to be unwilling to cover up errors, cupidity, malfeasance,  lies, usurpations, ambition,  and other possible causes of poor decisions. You must be willing to be removed from office.

To show remorse demands that you acknowledge a connection between your decisions and their results. It demands a moral accounting. These require acknowledging MORAL REALITY or what really is going on or has occurred in moral terms, not simply physical terms. A widespread failure to acknowledge moral realities is endemic in Washington and the mass media. This is because the conditions mentioned above are lacking. Power and the maintenance of power are valued more highly than truth. Consequently, Washington and the media have a pervasive spirit of moral unreality about them. Physical things are being done, like destroying Iraq and shutting down whole cities like Boston, but there is a disconnect between what is officially said about these matters and their moral meaning.

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12:19 pm on May 12, 2013