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Why I Believe
Bush Must Go
Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse
By George McGovern
06/01/08 "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.
anmcgove@dwu.edu
© 2007 The Washington Post
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