Tomorrow might very well represent our last chance to hold the Bush administration accountable for their remarkable campaign of lies, misrepresentations, and distortions preceding the start of the Iraq war in 2003. According to this press release, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has “allowed” Rep. Dennis Kucinich a chance to present his arguments that Bush should be impeached for lies and abuses of power of the utmost severity. The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee will be televised on C-Span at 10:00 a.m. Should the House of Representatives fail to impeach Bush for sending Americans into Iraq, it will be very difficult to prevent future presidents from using America’s military as pawns to serve whatever passing whim or fancy happens to possess them at a given time.
In his recent book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”, Vincent Bugliosi tries to set the table for any honest and courageous state or federal prosecutor to pursue criminal charges against Bush on behalf of the young men and women who were asked to lay down their lives in Iraq for no legitimate purpose. Bugliosi insists that, whether impeachment succeeds or fails, justice demands that a full criminal prosecution be undertaken on behalf of the thousands of men and women who have died as a result of Bush’s criminally duplicitous words and actions.
In a crucial first section, Bugliosi points to legal precedents and concepts showing that Bush can indeed be tried for first degree murder, not merely negligence or manslaughter. He engaged in activities and issued directives that he knew would lead to the wrongful deaths of others- the idea that he could have intended anything other than the deadly results is shown to be untenable. Whether the soldiers’ (and civilians’) deaths were the explicit object, the “end goal”, of the enterprise is irrelevant- like a bank robber who kills four people in the course of a robbery, the fact that murder was not his primary goal does not immunize the robber from prosecution for murder. Indeed, the lack of explicit hatred for any of the victims almost makes the crimes more loathsome. Instead of hatred, there is only complete and total indifference.
One disappointing thing about Bugliosi’s book is that he does not attempt to identify the actual motives behind Bush and Cheney’s obsessive push to invade Iraq. Bugliosi does not speculate much as to what Bush and Cheney actually hoped to gain from deceiving the public, Congress, and members of their own administration into believing Saddam was an “imminent threat to the United States”, and eventually procuring a somewhat qualified authorization from Congress to launch a preemptive war.
This has always been a baffling question for me as well- although there are a number of extant theories about Bush and Cheney’s true motivations. Was the Iraq War a huge, deadly political sideshow meant to distract Americans from the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden? Was it part of a plan to steal oil from Iraq to enhance the profits of oil companies and keep those companies profitable for years to come- a drastic measure intended to stave off the talk of reductions or even renunciation of fossil fuels that might have represented an unprecedented threat to behemoths like Exxon-Mobil? Was the invasion of Iraq a type of “pilot program” for the physical, political, and cultural demolition and reconstruction of whole nations, derived in part from the ideologies of conservative think tanks like the “Project for a New American Century”?
Whatever the actual reasons for the invasion, Bugliosi compiles enough evidence (most of it familiar) to prove that Bush himself never believed that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that Bush himself had no real reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to the Al Qaeda hijackers of 9/11. Thus, actions that might be legally justifiable if undertaken in good faith are shown to be the monumentally callous and deplorable acts of an amoral conniver.
One of these actions was the editing of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a document that was drawn up by the CIA and which explicitly stated that Iraq would pose a threat to the United States only if Saddam Hussein felt that an American attack was imminent. This absolutely crucial statement was entirely removed from the version of the NIE that was available to the public during the days preceding Congressional authorization for military force. The implications of both the original NIE statement and its later omission are staggering. By striking this statement from the report, Bush signaled his willingness not only to initiate an entirely unnecessary and unprovoked war but to instigate a war which the CIA believed would put the American people in unnecessary peril! Certainly few Americans in their right mind would agree to fight a war that promised to serve no defensive purpose whatsoever but which would trigger new threats and create unprecedented dangers. Because few sane Americans would assent to such a self-destructive, psychotic, and patently ludicrous proposition, the information was concealed.
Another indication that Bush was not acting in good faith was his perpetual raising of the bar for Hussein’s compliance while Hans Blix was trying and failing to locate evidence of Saddam’s storied stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A bloody invasion could only be justified to Congress and the American people by an imminent threat, the WMD’s. If this threat was conclusively proven to be nonexistent then no invasion would be necessary, and would probably have to be called off. Thus, it was of vital importance for Bush to make sure that Blix never finished his inspections. Instead of granting Blix’ request for several more weeks to complete his UN-approved mission, Bush invented an ultimatum that he knew Saddam Hussein would never agree to: that he and his sons leave Iraq immediately. Thus, Bush was able to preempt discovery of the truth and proceed with his invasion, in which over 4000 American lives and probably tens of thousands of Iraqi lives have been lost.
Bugliosi sometimes lets his emotions get the better of him (as do I), and his deep hatred for Bush as a human being is always apparent. He goes off on tangents about Bush’s character, remarking caustically about Bush’s perpetual grinning and joking while the IED’s blasted young Americans to oblivion in foreign deserts. Bugliosi seethes with rage over the president’s youthful draft-dodging and brazen hypocrisy. He spends pages railing at Bush’s shameless pursuit of a leisurely and lackadaisical lifestyle as families of military personnel agonized and soldiers who answered the call inevitably suffered and died. Indeed, Bush’s record-smashing vacations make the worst “state hack” ever exposed by Howie Carr look like an austere workaholic. These tangents, while providing formidable evidence of Bush’s indifference to the human costs of his decisions, do not really advance Bugliosi’s essential points. They would be more suited to the post-conviction, sentencing phase of an actual murder trial
Best known for his successful prosecution of Charles Manson in the early ’70s, Bugliosi is at his best stacking up concrete evidence refuting Bush’s anticipated lines of defense against the murder charges: claims of “faulty intelligence” and “not knowing then what we know now”. The gaps between what Bush knew and what he said, the transcripts of conversations in which administration officials seem to acknowledge the necessity of deceit to their overall objectives, and the myriad repetitions of discredited information by Bush and Cheney in the lead up to the war all tend toward one conclusion: these are two men sacrificing the lives of American soldiers to advance some sort of idiosyncratic political and economic agenda, without the informed consent of the American people. After 9/11, Americans wanted Bin Laden caught and terrorist acts prevented. Exploiting the fears and desires associated with this public sentiment, Bush and Cheney have been, are cu
rrently, and seemingly always will be engaged in some “other thing”, and they have used American soldiers as pawns in this other thing. Whether what they have done is best captured by the legal concepts of “treason”, “mass murder” or “war crimes”, I am in full agreement with Bugliosi that the penalty for these heinous offenses should be either life imprisonment or death.
