Sheridan: Con-Law

IRAQ: THE LIES BUSH TOLD US

Scott McClellan, Pres. Bush's former press secretary, has written a book about his experience.  The Baltimore Sun newspaper, in a review, below, reports that in it, McClellan describes how Bush lied us into war in Iraq not for any of the stated reasons of WMD or Saddam was an evil tyrant who deserved his comeuppance, but because Bush and his small group of war leaders wanted to fight a war of aggression in the Middle East in order to transform the region.

Coincidentally, I've been nearing the final chapter of Herbert P. Bix's "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan," (Harper Perennial, 2000) for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize.  His thesis is that Emperor Hirohito bore full responsibility for wars of aggression in China leading up to the American sanctions (freezing Japan's assets in the U.S., cutting off exports of scrap metal and prohibiting oil exports to Japan).  As a result, Japan surprise-attacks Pearl Harbor (and British Singapore) on Dec. 7, 1941.

After the utterly devastating defeat of Japan when the Soviet Union invaded, the two A-bombs not being enough after all of the fire-bombings from which they must have seemed indistinguishable to a leadership used to committing national suicide military unit by unit and and city by city in the name of the emperor, Japan finally gave in when the leadership had no means of fighting further.

There were internationally conducted, but U.S. led war tribunals conducted in Tokyo following the American occupation of Japan in which 26 war leaders were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, primarily of waging aggressive war contrary to the norms of civilized nations.  Japan had signed the between-war Kellogg-Briand peace treaty renouncing aggressive war as an instrument of national policy and other agreements such as the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and the outlawing of gas warfare.  Japan murdered an estimated 10,000 Chinese using poison gas.  Japanese leaders defended on the ground that Japan had waged a defensive war.

But Hirohito, the emperor by inheritance, the leading war criminal of all, was not accused.  MacArthur thought he needed him to help stabilize what he thought would be a rebellious country.  Hirohito needed MacArthur to stay alive and in office.

Hirohito and the military-political leadership treated the Japanese like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.  They presided over a culture of deception.

According to McClellan, the Bush spokesman, that's what Bush has done to us.  We're mushrooms.  We were led into a war of aggression, not in self-defense, based on lies that some of us now admit were lies.

How does this make us different from the people of Japan, a country we once found hateful in the extreme, to the point we were happy to nuke them not once but twice.

Where do we now stand in the event our leaders are brought before some international tribune of justice?

War crimes?

Crimes against humanity?

Aggressive war?

Gen. Curtis LeMay, commenting on his repeated firebombing of Japan, observed that had the war gone the other way, he'd have been in the dock as an accused war criminal.

Assuming that McClellan is correct, where does this leave Bush, Cheney, and the warrior princess, Condoleezza Rice?  And Colin Powell, who sold the lies to the U.N.

The review of McClellan's book from the Baltimore Sun is below.

PRESIDENT CHENEY

Vice-president Dick Cheney is now the President of the United States of America.

He was formally given stewardship of the nation this morning as Pres. George W. Bush underwent a colonoscopy during which he is sedated, i.e. rendered less than fully conscious for a short period of time.

Somehow, nothing seems to have changed.

Later today we expect V.P. Cheney to resume his former status as the 4th Branch of government, in addition, that is, to the traditional Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches we all learned about in grade school.  Fourth branches, of course, don't have to play by the rules set forth in the Constitution or the laws of Congress, do they. 

Do they?

***

Followup:  The procedure having been completed, it's back to Pres. Bush again.  Power has been switched back and forth.

The key ingredient of constitutional law is the legitimacy of power, who's got it and who doesn't.  We're very careful about that.  In this case, Bush-Cheney-Bush, the temporary transfer was documented and witnessed.  Among other things, the president, or acting-president, has near him at all times a package about the size of a briefcase, called "the football," which contains the codes needed to launch a nuclear attack, whether offensive or defensive.  We don't want the power to push the nuclear button in the wrong hands, even for a moment.  Fortunately the president was sedated for only 31 minutes, narrowing the window in which power had to be transferred. 

When Woodrow Wilson fell ill, he went incommunicado for weeks while his wife ran the nation, with the complicity of Wilson's doctors.  Why would they do that?  Power is a jealously guarded commodity to those who have it, not to be given up lightly.  So they're willing to play charades.  El Cid's aides propped his dead body up on his horse for to inspire his men in battle, so the Spanish legend goes.  There are  varieties of power, I suppose, but the idea is that as long as it appears to exist, and appears legitimate, people will follow and obey, from the people of a nation to an army in battle.

El Cid (in Spanish, Wikipedia)

PRES. BUSH: MAD, OR WORSE, BUT HAPPY

In case you were wondering whether George W was mad or power-mad, we have a possible answer:

       

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July 17, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Heroes and History

 

By DAVID BROOKS

   

I spent the first four days of last week interviewing senators about Iraq. The mood ranged from despondency to despair. Then on Friday I went to the Roosevelt Room in the White House to hear President Bush answer questions on the same subject. It was like entering a different universe.

Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq. If Gen. David Petraeus comes back and says he needs more troops and more time, Bush will scrounge up the troops. If GeneralPetraeus says he can get by with fewer, Bush will support that, too.

Bush said he will get General Petraeus’s views unfiltered by the Pentagon establishment. He feels no need to compromise to head off opposition from Capitol Hill and is confident that he can rebuild popular support. “I have the tools,” he said.

I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.

All this will be taken as evidence by many that Bush is delusional. He’s living in a cocoon. He doesn’t see or can’t face how badly the war is going and how awfully he has performed.

But Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq. After all, he lives through the events we’re not supposed to report on: the trips to Walter Reed, the hours and hours spent weeping with or being rebuffed by the families of the dead.

Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”

Second, Bush remains energized by the power of the presidency. Some presidents complain about the limits of the office. But Bush, despite all the setbacks, retains a capacious view of the job and its possibilities.

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

When Bush is asked about military strategy, he talks about the leadership qualities of his top generals. Before, it was Generals Abizaid and Casey. Now, it’s Generals Petraeus and Odierno.

When Bush talks about world affairs more generally, he talks about national leaders. When he is asked to analyze Iraq, he talks about Maliki. With Russia, it’s Putin. With Europe, it’s Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown and the rest.

He is confident in his ability to read other leaders: Who has courage? Who has a chip on his shoulder? And he is confident that in reading the individual character of leaders, he is reading the tablet that really matters. History is driven by the club of those in power. When far-sighted leaders change laws and institutions, they have the power to transform people.

Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.

According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.

If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.

 

WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE SAYING

People have been saying things that cast our president in a bad light. Fancy that.

How many members of the Bush administration does it take to change a light bulb?

Ten:

1. One to deny that a light bulb needs to be changed;

2. One to attack the patriotism of anyone who says the light bulb needs to be changed;

3. One to blame Clinton for burning out the light bulb;

4. One to tell the nations of the world that they are either for changing the light bulb or for eternal darkness;

5. One to give a billion dollar no-bid contract to Halliburton for the new light bulb;

6. One to arrange a photograph of Bush, dressed as a janitor, standing on a step ladder under the banner "Bulb Change Accomplished '';

7. One administration insider to resign and in detail reveal how Bush was literally "in the dark" the whole time;

8. One to viciously smear No. 7;

9. One surrogate to campaign on TV and at rallies on how George Bush has had a strong light-bulb-changing policy all along;

10. And finally, one to confuse Americans about the difference between screwing a light bulb and screwing the country.

***

Click image below to enlarge, or read the text reprinted below:

The cartoon strip is entitled "GREAT MOMENTS IN PUNDITRY: FOUR YEARS LATER; ALL QUOTES ARE GENUINE" and no, I don't know who wrote it or whether it is true; it's just something sent around on the Web, but why let that stop us.

1. Bill O' Reilly, Fox News Channel, 1/29/03:

"I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week."

2. Bill Kristol, Radio interview, 4/01/03:

"There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni...There's almost no evidence of that at all."

3. Brendan Miniter, opinionjournal.com, 4/08/03:

"It's amazing that more than two weeks into the liberation of Iraq...the anti-war crowd is still spinning a doomsday scenario."

4. Dick Morris, Fox News Channel, 4/09/03:

"Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing...the left is going to hang its head for three or four more years."

5. Fred Barnes, Fox News Channel, 4/10/03:

"The war was the hard part...and it gets easier. I mean setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war."

6. Tony Snow, Fox News Channel, 4/13/03:

"The three week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptic's complaints."

7. Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, 4/19/03:

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are upper West Side liberals, and a few people here in Washington."

8. Chris Matthews, MSNBC, 5/01/03:

"Americans love having a guy as president who has a little swagger...the women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president...we're not like the Brits."

9. Howard Fineman, MSNBC, 5/07/03"

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."

10. Mona Charen, Syndicated Column, 5/09/03:

"American forces are being 'love-bombed' by Baghdadis on a daily basis...Everywhere they go, Americans are being cheered and thanked profusely."

11. Morton Kondracke, Fox News Channel, 4/12/03:

"There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far...the final word on this is, Hooray."

***

The midterm elections of November, 2007, replaced the Republican majority in the House and Senate with a Democratic majority, indicating that a majority of the American people had rejected the war as being in the national interest any more, if it ever was.

More and more American boys are being sent out to die.

For what?

It must take awhile for a national tragedy to be recognized as such. It took a long time for Vietnam to be recognized as a bad adventure with no gain. The military learned this in short order, once it was no longer invested in fighting there.

How long will it take for the military to learn, if it hasn't already, or to speak out, against the long-term continuation of our great adventure in the sand?

Some of the generals, retired invariably, are already speaking out, Clark and Eaton and Zinni being among the foremost. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, whose son is fighting in Iraq, also speaks against the long-term continuation of the war. He argues that it is a mistake to justify continuing the fighting because we have troops in the field.

We have troops in the field to serve the national interest.

The national interest is not to keep sacrificing soldiers because we have troops in the field.

Our problem is that when Al Qaeda, based and trained in Afghanistan, attacked the Trade Center in New York on 9-11, bringing down the buildings, killing close to 3,000 civilians, and destroying a symbol of American economic might and influence in the world, we chose to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with this attack on America.

We did attack Afghanistan. But why Iraq? None of the stated reasons have panned out.

We're now engaged in three wars.

1. Afghanistan, trying to prevent the Taliban from making a come-back, and seeking Osama Bin Laden;

2. Iraq; the insurgency and civil war.

3. The GWOT (Global War on Terror).

I ask you how well we're doing in each.

I must say that I supported the war on Iraq based on what that idiot Colin Powell told the UN, backed by that other nincompoop, George Tenet, seated behind him. "I have seen the evidence and it is genuine and good," he/they told me and the world. They lied. So I'm not happy about that. They didn't let me see the evidence; I had to rely on them, and I did.

The three-week war went swimmingly, as wars go. Iraq wasn't WWI, or WWII, or Korea, or Vietnam, after three weeks.

Four years later of losing soldiers every day, not to mention civilian casualties many times that, we've lost over 3,000 soldiers following "Mission Accomplished."

The more we lose, the more the war drags on, the deeper the tragedy.

We've got to find a way out before long.

This seems to be what Congress is now trying to do under new leadership, with even GOP members distancing themselves from the Bush Administration and trying to impose some constraints on further military efforts. One representative introduced a bill, which did not pass, seeking to legislate against attacking Iran, the 800-pound gorilla neighboring Iraq. If Iran is caught supporting the insurgent attacks against U.S. forces more than it is already doing, we may have to attack Iran. This would be a direct result of the poor decision to attack Iraq in the first place, of course.

We did want to throw our weight around in the Muslim world to shake things up, it appears. The problem is that we are not succeeding installing anything that looks like a government we can live with. Iraq is a democracy in name, but is not functioning well, if at all. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia remains just that, a dictatorship, without any real pretense at democracy.

In some of those places I'm not sure we want to see a democracy. A democracy controlled by fundamentalists? Wahhabis? People who want to impose Islamic religious law, Sharia?

This is going from the frying pan into the fire.

I'll let you know when I've come up with the solution.

Don't hold your breath.

INCOMPETENT, THAT'S US

Conservative columnist Bob Novak writes, on the continuation below, about how incompetent the White House, the Attorney-General (Alberto Gonzales), and by implication, the United States now appears, in a world where appearance is reality, not only figuratively, but literally.

We're being led by idiots.

This has produced a few legal issues.

The Scooter Libby obstruction of justice prosecution convicted Libby, but condemned his boss, Vice-President Dick Cheney.

There's only so much dirt you can heap on the underlings before one begins to wonder about the top dog, George W.

How did he get so bad?

How has he made us look so bad?

He is surrounded by people who feel, instead of think.

And why not? Does the president think? Feel first, think later, seems to be his operating principle.

Law is a thinking profession, as much as a feeling one. We expect our judges and top executives to think, or to find people who can do it for them in areas where they're not expert, and then to pay some attention to the advice, especially in the more technical areas.

Is that happening?

The reason for the firing of the eight federal prosecutors appears to be that they were insufficiently loyal 'Bushies.'

Prosecuting is a technical function encased in a political wrapper, like a steamed pork bun in a dim sum restaurant, without tasting as good. Good prosecutors are in touch with the better of the American values. They go after the bad guys while insuring that the separate issue of the way it is done is properly looked after, the latter being called due process of law, which I suppose you knew.

Gonzales never tried a case in his life, or at least I never heard that he did. I did hear that he worked for this large and influential Texas law firm, Vinson & Elkins, of which Daddy Bush was an important client. Any time your client is the president of the United States, he's an important client, no matter who you are.

While there, the client's son, George W., latched onto Alberto Gonzales. It is good when running for office, such as governor of Texas, to have a Mexican-American, supporting you. So they scratched each others back. George W. became governor of Texas and put Alberto G. on the Texas Supreme Court. George W. became president and made Alberto G. the Attorney-General of the United States. George W. almost put both Harriet Miers and Alberto G. onto the Supreme Court. George W. is riding us off a cliff.

As a result, a large part of the country has turned against the war-policy of President George W. Bush. The Democrats have taken control of the House, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat, of Nevada is now Majority Leader of the Senate. The subpoenas are flying. A top official of the Justice Department, working under Gonzales, today said she'd take the Fifth when called to testify into the firings of the U.S. Attorneys. Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) today accused Gonzales of lying to her when he claimed he had little, if anything, to do with the firings. He was at the meeting when the decision was made, and without his concurrence, it would not have happened. That is the definition of having something to do with the firings. Gonzales lowered the axe lifted by Karl Rove above our prosecutors' necks.

It is amazing to me how much criminal law is practiced at the highest political levels of the land. In my lifetime, Attorney-General John Mitchell (under Nixon) was convicted of criminal activity under Watergate. Vice-president Spiro T. Agnew, under Nixon, was also convicted of criminal activity, accepting bribes as governor of Maryland, as I recall, and forced to resign. Pres. Clinton's assistant Attorney-General, Webster Hubbell, was criminally convicted. Pres. Bush has a criminal lawyer, Jim Sharp, arising out of the Plame-gate investigation out of which the Scooter Libby prosecution grew.

It was said of Pres. Nixon that he took crime off streets...and put it in the White House.

I feel better about my calling, criminal law, mainly, when I see the top officials of the land hiring criminal lawyers. I always knew that my calling was noble, representing the individual in his relationship to the power of the state.

We have a constitutional issue arising out of the conflict between the president, who wants to continue prosecuting the war in Iraq, dispite the terrible consequences to date, with so little to show for the protection of the United States, quite the contrary, in fact, and the House, under Speaker Pelosi, who wants the troops home yesterday, if not sooner.

Who decides a conflict such as this? The Supreme Court? I doubt it.

Why should the Supreme Court get mixed up in a power struggle?

This is a political struggle, a non-justiciable issue, to my thinking.

The winner is the branch of government which has the greatest support among the people, not the Court.

So far, Bush is losing, only he refuses to recognize it.

Pelosi, as I see it, may be winning.

She has the power of the purse.

He has the power to commit troops to battle.

Probably nothing ever written on paper is likely to be able to solve this conflict once and for all.

Our Constitution places the power to declare war in the Congress, per Art. I, Sec. 8, Clause 11.

But it also makes the president Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, per Art. II, Cl. 1.

Well there's a nice little conflict.

When Teddy Roosevelt wanted to show the flag, he sent the Great White Fleet around the world, without an appropriation to pay for the coal. What was Congress going to do, strand the fleet somewhere off the tip of South America? No way. Congress voted to bring the fleet back by appropriating the money to buy the coal to fuel the steam engines. Good old Congress, always supporting the troops when the president puts them in harm's way.

Constitutional issues take time to develop. They arise almost imperceptibly.

Take slavery, for instance. Did slavery cause our civil war?

Slavery existed for thousands of years without causing civil wars.

What caused our civil war was that a few people finally saw the light and realized that one person enslaving another was flat out wrong, no matter what the reason. Soldiers who lost battles were enslaved, as were their wives and children. Talk about your time-honored traditions, this was as old as the hills. Homer sang of the enslavement-to-be of Hector's wife and child, should he lose the hand-to-hand combat with Achilles outside the walls of Troy, which he duly did.

Enslave people of another race? What other race? Blacks were enslaving blacks and selling them to whites. Everyone's hands are dirty, blacks, whites, Christians, Muslims, and who knows, maybe even Jews. America the Beautiful was one of the great slaving nations of all time. Britain, 200 years ago today, enacted legislation abolishing the slave trade. Not slavery, mind you, but buying and selling slaves across the Atlantic. There's a difference. Abolishing the trade frees no slaves. It drives up their value, in fact. But ending the trade was a start, and we must acknowledge starts, despite long runs to the finish if ever there is a finish. There is still slavery in the world.

Slavery didn't suddenly trigger the U.S. Civil War. The war wasn't triggered until a more-or-less anti-slavery man was elected president. When Lincoln was elected, the South walked out in fear of what he might do.

We haven't had a Congress oppose the president on a war since the founding of the nation. When the South seceded, who was left in Congress? Only northern legislators, who supported Lincoln. Congress supported the North and the Civil War, for the most part.

Speaker Pelosi is breaking new American ground, refusing to continue paying for a war that doesn't seem to be working for us.

When did this happen in Britain, the mother country? Under Cromwell? Parliament refusing to appropriate money to suppor the king's war(s)? So the king abolishes (Parliament) for awhile? Until it comes back and refuses to support the war, using the power of the purse.

We wrote this power into our Constitution. The Army appropriation has to be re-voted on each and every two years. Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 12. This gives CONGRESS the power to control our wars, not the president, just as Parliament, after the revolution in 1688, at least, controlled British war-fighting, not the king. Our constitutional law is based on the British experience. Pelosi is actually using the power of the purse to rein in a president who seems to have lost the confidence of the majority of the country, but who doesn't want to climb down, any more than Charles I, the fella' who lost his head over this conflict.

We're thus living through a Constitutional crisis without, perhaps, realizing it.

Who is going to win? Congress or the Executive? Pelosi or Bush?

And what about us? When elephants fight, the grass is trampled.

We lost five more American soldiers today, in bombings by suicide bombers and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, i.e. home-made, more-or-less, bombs).

Welcome to Conlaw, it's all around you.

But you have to pay attention, or you may miss it.