Cheney Be Gone

It is my firm belief that the Cheney-Bush team has committed offenses that are worse than those that drove Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew and Atty. Gen. John Mitchell from office after 1972. Indeed, as their repeated violations of the Constitution and federal statutes, as well as their repudiation of international law, come under increased consideration, I expect to see Cheney and Bush forced to resign their offices before 2008 is over.

From the LA Times, George McGovern, Cheney is wrong about me, wrong about war, responding to a recent speech by Cheney:

VICE PRESIDENT Dick Cheney recently attacked my 1972 presidential platform and contended that today's Democratic Party has reverted to the views I advocated in 1972. In a sense, this is a compliment, both to me and the Democratic Party. Cheney intended no such compliment.

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On one point I do agree with Cheney: Today's Democrats are taking positions on the Iraq war similar to the views I held toward the Vietnam War. But that is all to the good.

The war in Iraq has greatly increased the terrorist danger. There was little or no terrorism, insurgency or civil war in Iraq before Bush and Cheney took us into war there five years ago. Now Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism, a bloody insurgency against our troops and a civil war.

Beyond the deaths of more than 3,100 young Americans and an estimated 600,000 Iraqis, we have spent nearly $500 billion on the war, which has dragged on longer than World War II.

The Democrats are right. Let's bring our troops home from this hopeless war.

Shaun Mullen of Kiko's House, reflecting on the death of journalist and author David Halbertsam, in his post David Halbertsam: Best & The Brightest, included the following:

Herewith an excerpt from an interview with Halberstam about Vietnam and Iraq:

"I think Vietnam and Iraq are different and yet there are a lot of parallels. There’s enough there to make you very uncomfortable if the way you see these things is shaped by our experience in Vietnam, as it is for me and so many of the senior military people . . . .

"I remember during Vietnam there was a generation of correspondents, some of the older ones, who were very tough on us younger correspondents because they had been in Korea or World War II and those wars had worked and there was a legitimacy to what we did then. And some of them were very quick to put down the younger reporters who were saying, 'This doesn’t work.' I had vowed never to be one of those who says, 'Guys, you just don’t know . . . I was in Vietnam and I know things you don’t know.' You know, pulling seniority and perhaps living in the past. So I was somewhat reluctant to talk too much about Iraq. But gradually, as we got nearer to it, I began to speak out.

"There were four or five points I was trying to make before the invasion. One was that we were going to punch our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world and end up doing the recruiting for Al Qaeda. I said that I thought that we would do the race to Baghdad very well—that the sheer military part would go well because our military is just very good, marvelous people, and our technology is awesome. But then the battle would change; we would be involved in urban guerilla warfare, and things would turn against us.

"I said that I thought the movie that they were all watching in the White House and the Pentagon was Patton, and the movie they should have been watching was The Battle of Algiers [the 1966 quasi-documentary film about the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the late 1950s].

"There is a moment in a war—as there was in Vietnam and as there will be in this war—where your military superiority is undermined or neutralized by your political limitations. And I thought the biggest miscalculation of all was a great underestimation of the colonial factor, just as there had been in Vietnam. In Vietnam the U.S. absolutely had refused to factor in the effect of the French Indochina War. And I felt the specter of colonialism would be a problem again in a more complicated way with Islam.

"The greatest miscalculation was not about the weapons of mass destruction, but the idea that we would be greeted as liberators. When the Bush people kept talking about that, alluding to what happened in France and Germany after World War II, well, anybody who had been in Vietnam would have been wary of it. There was just no way we were going to be greeted as liberators in this part of the world. The Iraqis might want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but they would not want us to do it for them."

Dick Polman also noted the passing of Halberstam, and referenced his best known book, The Best and The Brightest. Polman noted that its "insights into the perils of White House hubris" are just as relevant today. In his American Debate blog, Polman quoted from the conclusion of Halberstam's 1972 book:

Lyndon Johnson had lost it all, and so had the rest of them; they had, for all their brilliance and hubris and sense of themselves, been unwilling to look to and learn from the past….He and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America (about an unwinnable war) and perhaps incurring a great deal of domestic political risk…

Nor had they, leaders of a democracy, bothered to involve the people of their country in the course they had chosen; they knew the right path and they knew how much could be revealed, step by step along the way. They had manipulated the public, the Congress, and the press from the start, told half truths, about why we were going in, how deeply we were going in, how much we were spending, and how long we were in for. When their predictions turned out to be hopefully inaccurate, and when the public and the Congress, annoyed at being manipulated, soured on the war, then the architects had been aggrieved. They had turned on those very symbols of the democratic society they had once manipulated, criticizing them for their lack of fiber, stamina, and lack of belief….What was singularly missing…was an iota of public admission that they had miscalculated. The faults, it seemed, were not theirs, the fault was with this country which was not worth of them. So they lost it all.

Finally, Dennis Kucinich introduced Articles of Impeachment yesterday against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post, in At Last, Kucinich Begins His Quest for Impeachment, reported:

Kucinich introduced a House resolution "impeaching Richard B. Cheney, vice president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors" -- mainly for allegedly dragging America into war with Iraq "under false pretenses."

Why is Kucinich solely blaming Cheney and not both the vice president and the commander in chief? Because "if we started with Bush" and he actually got impeached, "Mr. Cheney would then become president," Kucinich replied.

When questioned by reporters about the support in Congress for his action, Kucinich responded:

"I do not stand alone. I have multitudes of people [supporting] me," he said.

Kucinich introduced three articles of impeachment against Cheney: The first accusing the vice president of deceiving the country by "fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify" an invasion of Iraq; the second accusing him of "purposefully" manipulating intelligence to Congress and the American public about a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda "despite all evidence to the contrary;" and the third for "threaten[ing] aggression against the Republic of Iran absent any real threat to the United States."

The past portends the present.