With refreshing candor all too scarce in recent public discourse, President Barack Obama assumed “full responsibility” as the nation’s commander-in-chief for the U.S. drone strike against suspected Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, which tragically took the lives of long-time American hostage Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto an Italian aid worker.   

Indeed, the world did not come to an end when Obama offered his mea culpa for the tragic deaths of the Western hostages in a U.S.-authorized drone strike. To be sure there are sincere and good Americans on both sides of the morality of drone strikes, especially those that might kill U.S. citizens, but there was almost no criticism and much praise for the President’s candor with the American people.

Winston Churchill once famously said that “wars are fought behind a bodyguard of lies.” It is often noted that in wars and ongoing conflicts, such as the struggle against terrorism and other forms of aggression, truth is often the first casualty. Yes there are circumstances when less than the full truth should be shared with the general public; the specific date and other details of D-Day, the Allied Normandy Invasion, in which surprise was of the utmost importance, that telling truths that could benefit the enemy would be foolhardy in the extreme.

But the American people did show they could handle the truth in regard to the accidental and tragic killings of Weinstein and the Italian hostage.  There are some other matters of foreign policy import that would greatly benefit from honest discussion and even apologies where warranted.  Consider the following:

• Why did National Security Adviser Susan Rice, on the public news of the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five top-tier Taliban terrorists, say that Berghdahl had served the U.S. military “with honor and distinction,” when it was clear at the time that Berghdahl was regarded as a deserter from his unit by his comrades-in-arms, a description later confirmed after a formal high-ranking officer’s investigation into the matter?  Why hasn’t Rice apologized to the American people for this blatant mischaracterization of the facts?

• Why does Secretary of State John Kerry doggedly continue to assert that we engage with the theocratic, anti-Western and anti-Israel regime in Iran with a path to nuclear weapons under terms of the Framework Deal announced in April, when the same Iran has shown that it cannot be trusted with conventional weapons?  Iran has sent war ships into the Strait of Hormuz, which were repelled by a welcome show of force by the U.S. 

Robert A. Cohn is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the St. Louis Jewish Light.