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The
Washington
Post
Opinion
Why I Believe Bush
Must Go
Nixon Was Bad.
These Guys Are Worse.
By George McGovern,
washingtonpost.com from the Web, January 6, 2008
As we enter the eighth year of the
Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the
only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the
vice president.
After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach
President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I
thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of
personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.
Today I have made a different choice.
Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment.
The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship,
especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the
part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan
impeachment and conviction are not promising.
But what are the facts?
Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They
have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and
international law. They have lied to the American people time after time.
Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a
historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high
crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.
From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product
of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged
-- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.
In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the
Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been
a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible
venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally
or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis
(according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost
to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total
of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as
our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our
national history.
All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the
Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation
of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as
well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners,
including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of
1949.
I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon
administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far
stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after
the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive
under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in
our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?
How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing,
immorality and lawlessness?
It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress,
the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and
other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United
States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was
involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in
recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble
for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of
fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the
invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal
tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led
government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are
at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.
Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the
streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without
benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.
Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that
Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the
country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought
us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion
of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if
Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S.
influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.
Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their
administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased
the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States.
Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and
those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990,
President George H. W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including
the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly
expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the
cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration
established a policy of containing the Bathes regime with international arms
inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable
country with little or no capacity to threaten others.
Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military
occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil
strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of
state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral
responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane
Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Safety condenses it
to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and
poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment
proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of
presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in
U.S. history.
Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to
act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the
Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws
of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the
world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our
country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray.
This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.
As former representative Elizabeth Boltzmann, who played a key role in the Nixon
impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent
revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly
thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) -- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the
interests of national security to override our country's laws -- that I felt the
same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. ... A President,
any President, who maintains that he is above the law -- and repeatedly violates
the law -- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."
I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the
opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation
and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and
Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the
difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long
enough to see the healing begin.
There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed
that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we
faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great
nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have
survived and recovered.
anmcgove@dwu.edu
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