Republicans and Independents for Impeaching Bush and Cheney

Completely buried by your national media last month was any mention of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel’s threat to impeach Bush if he started a war with Iran. If you want to send your media a nice note telling them they are complicit, treasonous collaborators go here. (Hey, just an idea!)

On May 21st at the Italian ambassador’s house Hagel said, of a unilateral Bush attack on Iran:

“You’ve got the power of impeachment, now that is a very defined measure if you are willing to bring charges against the president at all. You can’t just say I disagree with him, let’s impeach him.”

This isn’t the first time old Chuck has reminded George that he is not a king, and that U.S Senators have recourse to impeachment when he acts like one. Last March he said:

“He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.”

Bush’s instinct, usually correct, is that hyping the fear card of Big Bad Iran with a Big Bad Nuke will override any silly talk about illegality or civilian casualties. According to one poll, 52% of Americans are in favor of bombing Iran if it means preventing it from getting nuclear weapons. You never know how these questions are exactly worded, and sometimes it’s meant to herd you into a certain answer. If the poll asked - “would you NOT bomb Iran if it meant keeping world peace?” - you’d get a completely different result.

Last year Mike Huckabee had the nerve to say we might try talking to Iran, really try, not Bush “try”, before we start talking about bombing it. He says Bush has an “arrogant bunker mentality” in world affairs.

So what I want to do is have a hard look at the arguments going back and forth for more violence in the Middle East, as if there isn’t enough there already, and rationally argue, from a standpoint of our own self-interest, that bombing Iran is not a good idea.

But first let’s deal head on with something you hear every day, and I may be the first to do so, but it has to be done: Let’s just bomb the hell out of the whole Middle East and turn it into a parking lot, start all over. Assuming that advocating genocide is no problem for some people, and I have spoken with people who are dead serious when they say this, the fact remains that genocide is a war crime, the same as the Holocaust. The world wouldn’t tolerate it. If we just bombed the hell out of the Middle East, then China, Russia, or Pakistan would nuke us. It’s still not that easy to commit a genocide, thank goodness, so let’s get that out of our heads.

But back to why we shouldn’t bomb Iran, to keep it from getting a nuke:

- Because the real threat from loose nukes is from Pakistan, where the government just happens to consist of a good number of Al Qaeda sympathizers in the ISI, Inter-Intelligence Services, or from the old Soviet republics, where efforts to secure nuclear materials from old Soviet military bases have been neglected. Ripping the lid off of Valerie Plame’s network to detect the movement of such weapons didn’t help either.

- Iran has promised that it will not lay still like a good Third World country for its bombing, and has promised 40,000 suicide bombers ready to go against us if we attack them. That will be American blood directly on Bush’s hands

- Because it’s wrong. The evangelicals among us insist we are a Christian nation, so why don’t we start acting like Christians? Maybe that’s what Huckabee, an ordained minister, was getting at. Iran has one of the youngest populations in the world, and we’d be slaughtering children. There is no such thing as a “surgical strike,” and the generals know it.

-Because Iranian President Ahmadinejad is a clown with no respect in his own country, not the Hitler that Bush likes to make him out to be. He is regularly booed and taunted at Iranian University, by students who are bored and disgusted with his anti-Jew talk.

- Last, because the Iranian people are not our enemy.

Let’s take a quick look at our (dark) history with Iran. Here is a country headed for democracy in 1953 when the oil companies decide they don’t like this, and the CIA installs the Shah. The Shah turns out to be one of the worse torturers in history, and they are under his boot, with us supporting the Shah, until 1979 when they overthrow him. Iranians equate that day with our Fourth of July, and they should. We were on the wrong side, for the oil.

Here’s the amazing thing: They don’t hate us. They understand that what our government did to them is not the American people. Iranians traditionally like Americans and admire our democracy. You don’t bomb people who like you and make them not like you, because that is what bin Laden loves.

By trying for a nuke, Iran is only acting out the lesson which Bush’s foreign policy has taught the world: It’s not the countries that have nukes that get attacked by us; it’s the ones that don’t. It’s time to stop doing everything bin Laden wants us to do, so he has recruits for generations to come. There is silly talk about Obama being the Manchurian candidate. Look at the facts and it’s easy to see that if there ever was a Manchurian candidate, it’s Bush.

Hagel is retiring later this year, so maybe he’s looking for a legacy. A fine one for any politician would be impeaching Bush and Cheney and saving the Constitution. This will be the politician history puts alongside Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Patrick Henry.