Why I believe Bush must go
Nixon
Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.
By
George McGovern Read Spanish Version
This
article by Sen. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Party presidential
candidate, appeared Sunday, January 6 in the Washington Post.
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 Baathist 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
Cafferty 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 Holtzman, 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.
Note
from the editors: McGovern
forgest that the meausres imposed on the Hussein government after the
Kuwait invasion result in the death of close to a million children as
a result of the measures.
