The idea of guilt has always fascinated me. I have done several things in my life which must have hurt others, but I only feel guilty about some of them. The difference seems to be that given who I am, I cannot see how I could have done any different in some cases, while in others, I can see that different behavior was more or less within my reach, and I more or less chose the behavior that caused another pain.
The legal verdict of "Not guilty by reason of Mental Disease or Defect" seems to match this distinction. If it was not possible for the defendant to avoid hurting another, it seems wrong-headed to punish him for doing so. He may need treatment for the disease, or he may even need restraint because of the defect, but these should be clearly distinguished from punishment.
I can give a very public example of what I mean. With hindsight, it is clear that the US needed more troops on the ground to control Iraq after Saddam was removed from power. Some generals publicly predicted this beforehand, but they were ignored by the deciders. Who, if anyone, should we blame for this particular decision?
The most obvious target would be Donald Rumsfeld. He was the principal architect of the 'lighter, faster' military doctrine. But blaming him seems to ignore the fact that he was chosen for his position precisely because he was known to be committed to this view. Blaming him for doing what he was hired to do seems to me to be rather like an auto company hiring a basketball star to do an ad for them, and then refusing to pay him on the grounds that his height made the car's lack of headroom embarrassingly evident.
During the second world war, approximately one tenth of the front-line US soldiers ever fired a weapon at an enemy. The other nine-tenths were sent to places where no enemy soldiers ever appeared, but no-one knew that in time. In other words, if we had known in 1940 with complete certainty exactly where each enemy soldier would be on every day of the war, we could have achieved the same results with only one tenth of the number of soldiers.
Since the second world war, technological advances have enormously increased our capability to find out where enemy soldiers are and what their intentions are. We can also discuss and agree among ourselves much more quickly what to do about it, and can transmit this decision much more rapidly to our own soldiers. It is apparent that under today's conditions, at least half, rather than one-tenth, of our soldiers can be brought to action against another organized army. If the military is willing to take full advantage of modern technology, it can therefore do the job with one fifth of its current manpower, at least for the purpose of fighting a traditional army. Rumsfeld was hired to bring about these changes.
Military organizations adapt themselves very slowly to changing circumstances. In 1904 the British navy was paralyzed by the memories of their great victories in the Napoleonic wars. In 2001, the US military was almost equally paralyzed by the discontent of its leaders over the budget cuts at the end of the cold war. In each case, the civilian government chose someone who clearly (to me) had Asperger Syndrome (AS) to bring the organization kicking and screaming into the new century. (Jacky Fisher and Donald Rumsfeld). In each case, their AS enabled them to make the necessary changes, but in each case AS also caused them to view the next conflict primarily as an opportunity to demonstrate once and for all the correctness of their ideas, and both were removed from office before the war ended. Rumsfeld ignored warnings that however successful his ideas might be for toppling Saddam, modern technology helped very little in detecting the difference between a peaceful taxi-driver and a suicide bomber. To have added more troops would have jeopardized his proof of concept.
Now if Bush hired Rumsfeld for his single-minded determination to modernize the military, it seems senseless to blame Rumsfeld for doing so. His blindness to the results after Saddam's fall were an inevitable consequence of his AS. Having AS myself, I can see this clearly. Perhaps it is equally true that President Bush could not have behaved differently because of who he is, but this is not clear to me, so it does not seem unreasonable to me to blame Bush for not overruling Rumsfeld on the critical issues. To the extent that Bush, by his nature, was incapable of overruling Rumsfeld, we were wrong, in hindsight, for electing him.