- A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected
and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the
same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left,
the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March
2003. Moreover, the new president remains on the "withdrawal"
schedule the previous administration laid out for him with the same
caveats being issued about whether it can even be met.
-
- That administration also built a humongous, three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar
embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the most expensive on the planet. Staffed
with approximately 1,000 "diplomats," it was clearly meant to
be a massive command center for Iraq (and, given neocon dreams, the region).
Last weekend, well into the Obama era, the Washington Postreported that
the State Department's yearly budget for "running" that embassy
- $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint) in 2009 - will actually rise to
$1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In addition, the Obama administration now
plans to invest upwards of a billion dollars in constructing
a massive embassy in Islamabad and other diplomatic facilities in
Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will be a massive influx of
"diplomats," and here, too, a U.S. command center for the region
is clearly being created.
-
- What's striking are the continuities in American foreign
and military policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term
Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign
policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow
in the same vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently
reported that the controversial "missile defense shield"
the Bush administration was insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech
Republic is being reconsidered in a many-months-long Obama administration
"review." While this should be welcomed, the only option mentioned
involved putting it elsewhere - in Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans.
At stake is one of the great military-industrial boondoggles of our age.
Yet cancellation is, it seems, beyond consideration in Washington.
-
- Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of
the website AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those
calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney - and now
for bringing them to trial. He gives the term "activist"
a good name and he's a prodigious, energetic, thoughtful writer as well.
If you're as struck by today's piece as I was, you should consider giving
his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming
a More Perfect Union, published on this very day, a careful look. He's
special.
-
- Tom
-
-
- Bush's Third Term?
-
- You're Living It
-
- By David SwansonIt sounds like the plot for the latest
summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been
allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and
that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats
in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would
certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship
and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans.
Can't you just picture it?
-
- There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via
signing statements. Still creating and destroying laws with executive orders.
And still violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing
his policy of extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries
with grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even
picture himformalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing
it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas
corpus from our culture.
-
- I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't
torture, still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his
subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if
needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in
Afghanistan that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine
himcontinuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while
protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
-
- If Bush were in his third term, we would already have
seen him propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history
of the world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war
funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final supplemental
war budget was still needed, immediately after which he would surely announce
that yet another war supplemental bill would be needed down the road. And
of course, he would have held onto his Secretary of Defense from his second
term, Robert Gates, to run the Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling
along, and oversee the better part of our public budget.
-
- Bush would undoubtedly be following through on
the agreement he signed with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all
U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not
to follow through). His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking
word that the United States never intended to actually leave. He'd
surely be maintaining current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands
more troops to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there.
He'd probably also beescalating the campaign he launched late in his
second term to use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into
Pakistan's tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
-
- If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing
mercenaries like Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon
Group and he might even be expanding the number of private
security contractors in Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch
would be packed with disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have
somebody like John ("May I torture this one some more, please?")
Rizzo still serving, at least for a while, as general counsel at the
CIA. The White House and Justice Department would be crawling with corporate
cronies, people like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones,
and Eric Holder. Most of the top prosecutors hired at the Department
of Justice for political purposes would still be on the job.
And political prisoners, like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and
former top Democratic donor Paul Minor would still be abandoned
to their fate.
-
- In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic
team initiated in his second term would still be rolling along - with a
similar crowd of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would
certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third
term would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying
around with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the Democrats
proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign. At this point
in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would have begun to
restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.
-
- If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set
of needed reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation,
Bush, the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House
with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn such
proposals to their advantage. And he would haverefused to release the
visitor logs so that the American public would have no way of knowing just
whom he'd been talking to.
- During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking
torturers from Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials
responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained untouched.
If the public continued to push for justice for torturers during the early
months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have gone withanother
bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only low-ranking CIA interrogators
and CIA contractors for prosecution. Bush would undoubtedly have decreed
that any higher-ups would not be touched, that we should now be looking
forward, not backward. And he would thereby have cemented in place the
power of presidents to grant immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
-
- If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and
second term secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by
lawsuits, but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse
than what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would
surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast bulk
of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden from
the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with ever
grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of sight.
-
- Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third
Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In
following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule
of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were
otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama has, in all
the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course. Everything described,
from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from
the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power
to legislate, is Obama's presidency in its first seven months.
-
- Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two
moments. For one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving
expanded presidential powers and even - in the case of wars, military strikes,
lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the obstruction
of justice - presidential crimes. In addition, in the new Democratic era
of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been strikingly defunded and,
in some cases, even shut down. Many progressive groups now, in fact, take
their signals from the president and his team, rather than bringing the
public's demands to his doorstep.
-
- If we really were in Bush's third term, people would
be far more active and outraged. There would already be a major push to
really end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly,
the Democrats still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able
to vote him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him
wouldn't make all that much difference.
|
