Hearing Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney go on about how President Obama shouldn’t have said he was sorry that our troops burned some Korans by mistake, one wonders if they think that Afghanistan is a make-believe country, or a giant, nation-shaped toddler. Gingrich said that the apology was an “outrage.” (He later added, speaking of the Afghans, “You clearly don’t want to learn from me how to be unmiserable.”) Romney said that it was hard “to countenance.” Here’s Santorum:

I don’t think the president should apologize for something that was clearly inadvertent. What you should lay out is the president saying this was inadvertent. This was a mistake and there was no deliberate act, there was no meant to disrespect. This was something that, that occurred that, that should not have occurred, but it was an accident and leave it at that. I think you highlight it when you, when you apologize for it. You, you make it sound like it was something that you should apologize for. And there is not—there was no act that needed an apology. It was an inadvertent act and it should be left at that and I think the response has—needs to be apologized for by, by Karzai and the Afghan people of, of attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and, and overreacting to this, to this inadvertent mistake. That, that is, that is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.

So “there was no act that needed an apology,” because we didn’t mean to do a bad thing? Even in preschool, you apologize if you carelessly whack something with your elbow and it breaks, or if you shred someone else’s drawing for papier mâché, whether you meant to be destructive or not. As for being “clearly inadvertent”—it is an apology that makes that sort of thing clear; we cannot, like small children, act as if our good intentions should be obvious, and that anyone who doesn’t recognize them is just being mean. Maybe Santorum and his fellow-candidates have been trapped in the kindergarten-delinquent classroom of the Republican primaries for so long that they think the same rules, and illogic, that help decide who the not-Romney of the week is apply everywhere. But Afghanistan is a real and dangerous place; more than two dozen people have died in the violence, including two Americans, who were assassinated in the Interior Ministry. (The Afghan government reportedly did apologize for that.) The senselessness of the response does not take away from the necessity of an apology, or from its grace.

That seems obvious, at least, to General John Allen, our commander in Afghanistan, who apologized unreservedly even before Obama did. Watching a video (above) of him visiting our troops, and asking them to stay calm in the face of violence, is a good dose of reality in the face of the candidates’ commentary. Allen talks like a grownup. He told the soldiers:

There will be moments like this when you’re searching for the meaning of this loss. There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. These are the moments when you reach down inside and you grip the discipline that makes you a United States soldier… now is the time to look deep in your souls remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are.

He added,

We admit our mistake, we ask for forgiveness, we seek to move on.

Or we try to. In apologizing, we remind ourselves who we are. We also learn more about where we are, who we are talking to, and our circumstances. Having done so—done the right thing—we may reasonably conclude that we can make our apologies, and leave.