Forgive and forget?
By
Paul Krugman Read Spanish Version
From
The New York Times
Last
Sunday [January 11] President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he
would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush
administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,”
he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking
backwards.”
I’m
sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during
the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks
to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are
indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if
they abuse their power.
Let’s
be clear what we’re talking about here. It’s not just torture and
illegal wiretapping, whose perpetrators claim, however implausibly,
that they were patriots acting to defend the nation’s security. The
fact is that the Bush administration’s abuses extended from
environmental policy to voting rights. And most of the abuses
involved using the power of government to reward political friends
and punish political enemies.
At
the Justice Department, for example, political appointees illegally
reserved nonpolitical positions for “right-thinking Americans” —
their term, not mine — and there’s strong evidence that officials
used their positions both to undermine the protection of minority
voting rights and to persecute Democratic politicians.
The
hiring process at Justice echoed the hiring process during the
occupation of Iraq — an occupation whose success was supposedly
essential to national security — in which applicants were judged by
their politics, their personal loyalty to President Bush and,
according to some reports, by their views on Roe v. Wade, rather than
by their ability to do the job.
Speaking
of Iraq, let’s also not forget that country’s failed
reconstruction: the Bush administration handed billions of dollars in
no-bid contracts to politically connected companies, companies that
then failed to deliver. And why should they have bothered to do their
jobs? Any government official who tried to enforce accountability on,
say, Halliburton quickly found his or her career derailed.
There’s
much, much more. By my count, at least six important government
agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in
most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then
there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt
that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into
invading Iraq?
Why,
then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the
Bush years?
One
answer you hear is that pursuing the truth would be divisive, that it
would exacerbate partisanship. But if partisanship is so terrible,
shouldn’t there be some penalty for the Bush administration’s
politicization of every aspect of government?
Alternatively,
we’re told that we don’t have to dwell on past abuses, because we
won’t repeat them. But no important figure in the Bush
administration, or among that administration’s political allies,
has expressed remorse for breaking the law. What makes anyone think
that they or their political heirs won’t do it all over again,
given the chance?
In
fact, we’ve already seen this movie. During the Reagan years, the
Iran-contra conspirators violated the Constitution in the name of
national security. But the first President Bush pardoned the major
malefactors, and when the White House finally changed hands the
political and media establishment gave Bill Clinton the same advice
it’s giving Mr. Obama: let sleeping scandals lie. Sure enough, the
second Bush administration picked up right where the Iran-contra
conspirators left off — which isn’t too surprising when you bear
in mind that Mr. Bush actually hired some of those conspirators.
Now,
it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would
make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused
power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these
people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their
comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight
years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.
Meanwhile,
about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political
interests to forgive and forget, next week he’s going to swear to
“preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United
States.” That’s not a conditional oath to be honored only when
it’s convenient.
And
to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than
obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the
Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent
decision to let the previous administration get away with crime.
Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.
