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Slouching into the 700 Club: A JeremiadMay 26 '04 (Updated May 27 '04) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Impeach Rumsfeld NOW!
Aside from the strained alliteration, the title is a tribute to Sloucho, a great epinion book and movie writer who stopped at 199 without any explanation (though eventually adding a 200th review before returning to epinions silence). The ascetic part of me that chides me for the distractions of epinions life would like to hang at 699, but the (dominant!) self-indulgent side whines that it's time for another of those round-number editorials, even though these are less common than in days of yore. I am also approaching my fourth anniversary here, and finally got my 50,000th member hit. I can still remember very well when I was new (and encouraged, in particular, by Ed_Grover and Hadassahchana), but have become one of the ancient ones here, as in real life. There is little new in epinions to editorialize about. The search engine continues to spew garbage. Particularly for movies, an external search engine such as google is necessary even to find an exact title match. On top of the justifiable irritation at the addition of popularity reports on member profile pages without notice, consultation, or providing any way for individuals to suppress the feature, the links inside "See all popular reviews" continue not to work." Why was the feature that didn't work added, and why is it still (a) there and (b) not working, six or so months later? (see my 600th epinion at http://www.epinions.com/content_3641680004) I could reiterate my complaints about the irrational contrast sets in movie review specifications from http://www.epinions.com/content_6958124676 or take a position on the question of "top reviewers" who have been long inactive on the site, but have instead decided to write about Why Donald Rumsfeld should be impeached. (This is aimed at US epinionators—and their congressional representatives.) What has been much in the news around the world is the mistreatment of detainees at American military-run prisons. As Seymour Hersh put it in the New Yorker, "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Quaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror." This is elaborated in Hersh's article that provides background of the Defense Department's parallel intelligence agency at www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2 and www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact. (That George W. was not out of the loop of Red Cross complaints to his government is established at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.powell12may12,0,2804533.story?coll=bal-news-nation.) The US Armed Forces, deployed around the world, have a strong interest in prisoners being protected by the Geneva Conventions, but the Bush-Rumsfeld contempt for international laws and treaties (which when ratified by congress are laws) — and for foreigners in general — created the atmosphere in which abuse of people snatched up in homes and streets in Iraq and Afghanistan occurred. The CIA, State Department, and Army legal apparatus (Judge Advocate Generals) all objected, but the White House legal counsel and Rumsfeld contended that the US is not bound by any rules because we are fighting a war against terror and torture and humiliation of some Arab detainees might advance the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld agenda for a New World Order. A typically cavalier Rumsfeld pronouncement (from early 2002, quoted by Hersh), was that complaints about America’s treatment of prisoners amounted to “isolated pockets of international hyperventilation.” Even this month, Rumsfeld continues to claim that the Geneva Conventions (even the less stringent fourth category) do not "precisely apply." However, as Fareed Zakaria pointed out in Newsweek, the Geneva Conventions and the torture banning torture "are the law of the land, signed by the president and ratified by Congress. Rumsfeld's concern—that Al Quaeda members do not wear uniforms and are thus 'unlawful combatants'—is understandable, but that is a determination that a military court would have to make. In a war that could go on for decades, you cannot simply arrest and detain people indefinitely on the say-so of the Secretary of Defense. The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been 'We're at war; all those niceties will have to wait.' As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its 'advise and consent' are constitutionally mandated." With the support of George W. Bush, Rumsfeld managed to cut first the State Department, then the CIA, then the army command structure out of planning for the war and the peace that various delusional right-wing officials headed by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliot Abrams believed would quickly follow the removal of Saddam Hussein. These ideologues signally failed to anticipate the need for policing Baghdad and other cities once Saddam fell, massively underestimated the cost (in dollars and in lives) of the Iraq adventure, and produced policies and procedures certain to aid al-Quaeda recruitment across the Abode of Islam. Their claims of al-Quaeda connections to Saddam Hussein were among the many false rationales for a pre-emptive invasion. Al-Quaeda now openly operates in Iraq (and again in parts of Afghanistan), whereas it was repressed by Saddam Hussein (along with the Shi'ite Islamists). Not just a distraction from the real enemy (Al-Quaeda), the under-planned, under-personneled adventure has strengthened it, providing new sites (Iraq) and new grievances (in Iraq and in countenancing attacks with US armaments imn Gaza). The weapons of mass destruction that were purportedly an immediate danger to the United States did not exist. The supposed negotiations in Niger were known to be false "intelligence" by the CIA (see Ambassador Joseph Wilson's book The Politics of Truth and the Bush administration's retaliation of outing his wife and endangering those with whom she had associated). The prolonged deployment of National Guard reservists to Iraq and assignment without any special training to Saddam Hussein's main torture facility flow directly from the Rumsfeld underestimation of the personnel needed to maintain order in Iraq (and from his unprecedent personal detailed involvement in promoting those who told him what he wanted to hear and marginalizing those providing realistic assessments undercutting the fantasies of Wolfowitz et al.). Quoting again from Zakaria, "Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraqi—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—[the Rumsfeld clique's] assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now, most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. The strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world." Being delusional and making catastrophically bad decisions that help recruit terrorists are not impeachable offenses. They are good reasons for voting the perpetrators of such miscalculations out of office come November, but it seems to me that lying to Congress and the use of funds appropriated for other things to plan and sell the Iraq campaign are impeachable offenses. This and aspects of the creation of a rogue intelligence-gathering unit to violate laws (international and US) that the CIA will not are high crimes (especially in comparison to obfuscating whether or not fellatio is included in "having sexual relations"). That the "liberal press" is a right-wing bogey-man is demonstrated by the failure of investigative reporting on the pre-invasion expenditures either at the time or now (and, for that matter, for the lack of follow-up on how the senior Bush's SEC failed to investigate W's insider trading, which was vastly more consequential than the Whitewater investment in which the Clintons lost a hundred grand, once upon a time). Where is the concern for "truth" and the public's right to know that Lindsay Graham so fervently expressed as an impeachment prosecutor about what was going on between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? Evasions about what occurred with the consent of an adult is reason to command the attention of Congress, but not the remaking of the government, the misappropriation of funds, the abrogation of laws, and promotion of war crimes? What Rumsfeld has wrought with tencouragement of Cheney and Bush makes even the attempted by Richard Nixon to use the CIA and FBI against critics of the Vietnam war that he prolonged and to subvert the Constitution pale in comparison. Rumsfeld should be impeached by the US House of Representatives now for multiple crimes against US and international law. --- Segueing back to epinions, when will we see Stockholder's contribution to his writeoff on being wrong about the wisdom of the pre-emptive war George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld launched in Iraq? The lone celebration he took as showing critics of the adventure was wrong looks ever more pathetic as coffins continue to return to the US (though the Bush-Rumsfeld junta attempts to keep them from being shown).  |
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