So I hear that the entire cabinet resigned today because of something 
that happened in Bosnia 7 years ago  (http://dw-
world.de/english/0,3367,1434_A_499195_1_A,00.html)

It seems very strange that this would be such a big deal. Am I missing 
something? Was this a mistake or something more sinister?

11 responses total.

It was incompetence and extremely bad judgement.  The piece you may be
missing, though, is that the Prime Minister who just resigned is the same one
who was in office when the massacre actually happened.

 .. because the dutch generally take responsibility when they fuck up, as
opposed to our country which just blames someone else.

Could someone explain what happened?

http://news.yahoo.com/news?u=/ap/20020416/ap_wo_en_ge/bosnia_srebrenica_9

and here is the highlights:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?u=/ap/20020416/ap_on_re_eu/srebrenica_report_gla
nce_1

Based on memory of a few NPR reports, here's the rough situation:
Holland sent a small bit of its army to Bosnia during the really-bad-
old-days a few years ago, with the supposed high-minded purpose of 
protecting muslim civilians from Serbian Genocide (tm).  The situation
that the small, indifferently-supported Dutch unit found itself in was
ground zero of a disaster fed up with merely waiting to happen.  The
situation deteriorated, the Dutch troops wound up turning lots of muslim
civilians in the "UN Guaranteed <gag> Safe Zone" over to the grateful
Serbs, who then indulged in their usual rape, murder, etc., and Dutch
honor came home with a self-inflicted cannon-wound to the foot.  

The folks back home behind the dikes were (overall) pretty unhappy with
this, and a major investigation was started.  The official results came
out recently, and were quite unflattering (especially to the top levels
of the Dutch government), but still smelled of somewhat-pulled punches.
Public scandal, indignation, moral mortification, etc. have been building
up since then.  My impression is that the whole cabinet (many of 'em NOT
in power back when the bad stuff happened) resigned together because
they more-or-less felt too morally soiled to go on.  


I agree that i can't imagine America's political leaders demonstrating
this level of responsibility or moral sense under any conditions what-
soever.  I'd hope that this becomes a "when to ignore politicians and
defend America's honor to the death" example in our military textbooks. 

Thanks Walter.

#5>  I agree that American's politcal leaders have demonstrated the most
unflattering understanding of responsibility.  It ranges from denial to
shedding a few crocodile tears and continuing on as if absolved after issuing
a statement to the press.  I have in mind the meaningless acceptance of
responsibility that Reno took for the Waco debacle and Reagan took for the
161 marines killed in Beirut.

Or Nixon early in the Watergate scandal: "I accept responsibility."  I.e.,
move along now, the ruckus is over.

I guess I see a big difference between an honest mistake, negligence or 
deliberately doing something wrong in order to personally gain. This, 
at first, sounded like an honest mistake but apparently there was some 
negligence on the part of certain government officials. Still, I am not 
sure I would have expected anyone to resign over this. I feel there is 
more than I am missing besides that the president who just resigned was 
the same guy who was in power when this happened. 

  Heck, I'll accept responsibility all of the time as long as I can 
  choose to reject consequences whenever convenient..

Precisely

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