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.
This is nutso territory. These people really can't move on from anything. The Supreme Court validated the election. And by virtually any standard of a recount that might have been held, American newspapers concluded that Bush won. Indeed, by the very narrow standard that Gore wanted the recount, Bush would have won. If you want to talk vote suppression, let's talk the Gore effort to suppress military votes in Florida. Face it, the election reflects what we know--the nation is divided politically. Bush won in 2000 and again in 2004. Get over it.
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.
We are not at war with Iraq. We are at war alongside a sovereign Iraqi democratic government in a fight against barbarous enemies. The Kurds and Shias are happy Saddam is gone and even Sunni Arabs see us as their best hope against paying the price for their past support of Saddam and jihadi suicide bombers. The war was legally declared by a Republican House and Democratic Senate, which continued to the logical conclusion our official policy of regime change signed by President Clinton.
McGovern has our casualties correct but by mistating the nature of the war he wrongly concludes they are wasted lives.
As for the so-called study of Iraqi casualties, that was a piece of propaganda the likes of McGovern are eager to believe contrary to the facts. Explain to me how our press missed those mounds of bodies? The monetary price is high but we spend cash to minimize blood--ours and innocents. It is no more accurate to say we borrowed to fight in Iraq than it is to say we borrow to finance Medicare or welfare or any other budgetary item. Given that our GDP is the highest in our nation's history, it is ignorant to simply state our debt is the highest. I mean, duh. Our proportion of debt to GDP is in line with other advanced industrial countries and below that of many.
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.
Congress declared war. Period. That's what the authorization to use force was. Certainly, Congress didn't recite the magic words "we declare war," but few military actions in our country's history have used those words. We waged an undeclared naval war against France at the end of the 18th century and the Tripolitan War in the early 19th century was waged with the consent of Congress but without a declaration of war. Clearly, our founders understood the intent of the founders. Further, using those magic words today automatically unleashes a series of acts to nationalize the country as was done in World War II. This automatic trigger was created in the Cold War under the fear of a Soviet first strike that would destroy Congress' ability to enact such laws from scratch. That's why we don't "declare war" now.
Further, the UN has ratified our presence in Iraq repeatedly, and remember that Iraq was in violation of the ceasefire that suspended the UN-authorized war in 1991. Exactly two wars (against North Korea and Iraq) have had UN authorization--both waged by America I would add. International law does not deny us the right to judge our own defense needs. It is beyond me why we should be judged uniquely as UN charter violators when every war waged by every other nation (except for those who participated in the wars we led in Korea and Kuwait) lacked a UN authorization. And if the 1991 was the gold standard, why was the vote in Congress to authorize force closer than in 2003? Shouldn't the blessings of the sainted international community have made those votes unanimous? And why no complaint that Congress didn't actually "declare war" in 1991? My how times change.
McGovern's allegations of prisoner torture and abuse are laughable. While isolated abuses, mostly cases of humiliation and not torture let alone physical abuse, have taken place, they pale in comparision to our enemy's routine practices of butchery and cruelty. And we punish those who violate our standards. This charge is particularly grotesque under the circumstances.
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 Clinton administration, the press, and Congress spend the 1990s arguing that Saddam posed a threat with WMD. Look it up. President Clinton bombed alleged Iraqi chemical facilities in Sudan and Iraqi nuclear facilities in Iraq. Bush never argued that Saddam had nuclear weapons and never claimed Saddam was an "imminent" threat. Why else did we spend so much time gearing up for that war? You will only find Democrats using that word.
The administration never ever implied that Iraq was involved in 9/11. Oh, the anti-war side constantly charged that but could never find more than an isolated comment taken out of context and argue that somehow swamped every other statement by the administration to the contrary--let alone the constant harping on this by the anti-war side. The administration argument was that in light of 9/11, we couldn't risk the likes of Saddam passing WMD (gas, bugs, radiological, or nuclear) to terrorists who clearly want us dead in large numbers.
And just as many misquote Jefferson, "my country" in McGovern's quote refers to British American which was taxed and ruled by Britain without our consent. Again, a Dowdified quote stripped of context. Nice try, nimrod.
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.
Climate of fear? Our people hardly know we are at war. The only fear-mongering is the constant refrain that Bush has or is about to impose fascism. Yet Bush stood for reelection, accepts court rulings and laws against it's policies, accepted the loss of Congress, will step down in one year, endures book after book charging him with crimes and mistakes, and NYT reporters continue to attack the administration rather than sit in hidden jails. Yeah, that's quite the Bushtatorship.
As for illegal phone tapping, that has consisted of traffic analysis at home looking for patterns to identify terrorist communications, the interception of selected calls between US phones and identified terrorist-related phones, and listening to certian foreign-to-foreign calls that go through our system simply because of the structure of the global telecommunications network right now. Google knows more about you than Bush does.
Bush has repeatedly called Islam the religion of peace and goes to great lengths to separate terrorists from Islam as a whole. It is the anti-war side that contributes to the identification of Islam with terror by refusing to accept that jihadis draw motivation from their perversion of Islam.
And prisoners of war do not require habeus corpus and we continue to examine and release prisoners from Gitmo--some of whom return to killing. Indeed, it was once considered immoral to charge enemy prisoners with crimes. Yet we face unlawful combatants who violate all the rules of war and we are condemned. We give them far more rights than they are entitled to.
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.
The intelligence community only said it had high condience Iran stopped a narrowly defined set of nuclear weapons programs and had a moderate level of confidence that Iran did not resume those programs. Many of our allies have expressed shock at the conclusion drawn that Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons. As for McGovern's professional knolwedge and experience, that and a buck will get you a cup of coffee. Oh, and McGovern should tell George Clooney that we won't be doing anything about Darfur since Sudan is Moslem and exports oil.
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.
McGovern acts like we have been attacked at home since 9/11 and he ignores the pre-9/11 history of Moslem terrorist attacks on Christians, Hindus, Jews, and other Moslems. He ignores the long string of attacks on Americans by jihadis from Beirut to East Africa to the Cole. Yes, we ejected Iraq from Kuwait in 1991--a war our Left objected to at the time. And at the time our Left ridiculed us for being "mercenaries" fighting for a war that others paid for. How times change.
And leaving Saddam in place in 1991 just led to more terror and oppression with Saddam doing his best to harm us and his neighbors until we drove him from Baghdad for good in 2003. That so-called stability was the quiet of a cemetery. Our Left condemned our sanctions and no-fly zones for killing Iraqi children. Saddam paid for Palestinian suicide bombers, repeatedly threatened the Kurds and invaded once despite our no-fly zone, even threatened the Kuwaitis with invasion again overtly in 1994 and later more subtly, and was well on the way to eliminating the weakening sanctions in the face of the Left's outcry and the conviction in the Moslem world that we were causing mass death in Iraq.
Further, while al Qaeda invaded Iraq after we destroyed Saddam's regime, we have smashed them on this battlefield of Osama's choosing. It' like blaming our invasion of Italy in 1943 for "causing" the Germans to invade Italy. And Moslems increasingly view Osama and terrorism as wrong, according to international polling. So much for that ridiculous charge.
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.
Iraqi was not a breeding ground of terrorism, it was an importer of terrorism. And we have killed jihadis in large numbers while the Moslem world could see that terrorists killed Moslems just as readily as they killed infidels. McGovern again fails to see that we are defending innocent Iraqis from savage murderers aided by foreign Sunni backers of jihadis and Iran's backing of Shia death squads. And spare me the 1980s realism of Baker and Scowcroft that has failed to adapt to changing realities even after two decades of dramatic change.
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.
It was the worst natural disaster in US history with responsibilities shared at local, state, and national levels. Why was Mississippi OK and New Orleans uniquely plagued? Perhaps a look at Louisiana and New Orleans mistakes would bear more fruit than complaining about the federal response to the "worst natural disaster in US history" that only seemed to screw up in one city.
McGovern is a disgrace to America. He served our country in the skies over Germany dropping bombs on German cities. All I can say is that the distance from 1945 to today is great by any measure you want to use to judge his transformation to nutball. His charges are ludicrous and his ability to actually believe them indicate his complete separation from reality. One wonders how he submitted his column to the Post given it was surely written in crayon.
The Post should be ashamed of publishing this unhinged diatribe against the administration that will surely be cited as the prime example of Bush Derangement Syndrome distilled onto one page.
UPDATE: You know, what is particularly maddening is that McGovern probably killed more civilians during his bombing runs over Germany than every American aircrew that has fought over Iraq and Afghanistan during the entire war. He can shove his moral superiority if he doesn't see that our forces fight with honor just as his comrades did under far less restrictive rules of engagement.
UPDATE: My comment above is hyperbole, I hope it is clear. On another note, McGovern couldn't even get his own history right let alone our country's. In his article, McGovern says he is advocating impeachment of Bush even though he didn't support impeachment for Nixon. Volokh Conspiracy notes that McGovern did indeed call for the impeachment of Nixon.
It seems very typical for the Left to try to persuade by claiming the current problem is unique in its requirement to listen to the Left. So now McGovern claims to have been against impeachment of Nixon and that Bush 43 is so much worse he deserves impeachment where Nixon did not. This is much like the anti-war side opposing Desert Storm in 1990-91 and only now in their attack on the current Iraq War do they claim falsely to have really been all for the Persian Gulf War. Which means, as they try to convey, that you can believe that their opposition isn't reflexive or anything like that. Feh.
