I see today that photos of mistreatment by American military guards of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have angered President Bush, who assures us that any soldier found to be at fault will be punished. The articles were apparently first shown to an American audience on CBS program "60 Minutes II", and were re-shown on the Al-Jazira and Al-Arabiya networks. (Al-Jazira, which has been accused by the Bush administration of showing "deliberately inciteful material", has publicly wondered whether the Bush administration would come down on CBS, as well.)
Elsewhere in the New York Times article by Thom Shanker and Jacques Steinberg, I find the following passage: "... inquiries are under way into whether any commanders should be held responsible for the actions of their subordinates ..."
My, how the world has changed! Forty years ago I went through Air Force Officer Training School at Lackland Air Force Base, in Texas, and one of the first things we were taught in that long-ago era is that (putting it in terms that make sense today) if it happens on your watch, and people under your command are at fault, it's your responsibility. No "inquiries" need apply.
Of course, at this distance it seems that the era in question was not all that long after Harry Truman made his famous comment: "The buck stops here!"
At the very least it is part of the job of the individual at the top of the food chain to establish a standard of behavior that those below him will try to live up to. Obviously, no one, including General Karpinski, could be expected to personally guard every prisoner in the prison; but he should at least have proactively made himself aware of what was going on below him, and taken steps to ensure that any hanky-panky was stopped immediately. Apparently, he did not.
This seems to be a general mindset these days -- if I didn't do it, it wasn't my fault (which is likely true) nor my responsibility (which is not). Some people seem to know the difference (Richard Clarke, apologizing to the victims of 9/11 for whatever role he may passively have played in the failure to prevent that atrocity) and some people apparently do not (administration excoriation of Clarke for that act on the grounds that he "had no right" to make such an apology). President Bush, so far, has refused to admit any fault in 9/11, and in this he is probably (at least for the most part) right; he has also, it seems, refused to take any responsibility for what happens, and, as the man at the very top of the intelligence food chain in this country, in this he is unequivocally wrong, as he should have learned in his Air Guard training, but apparently did not.
Shall we pick on Bush for this? Probably not. President Clinton, on his watch, was not tested in the same way, but I admit that I have a hard time imagining him figuring out how to take responsibility for something as catastrophic. It would be interesting to know how Senator John Kerry would react as president in the face of similar problems. Since he had his military ethical training in the same era I did, I like to imagine that President Kerry would understand that, for the commander-in-chief, there are no limitations on his responsibility.