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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
9, 2006
Enforcers or Enablers?
Will
the Demcrats Become Part of the Problem?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
It only took six years for Americans
to comprehend George Bush and the Republican Party and to realize
that the Republicans were not leading America in any promising
directions.
Exit polls and interviews with
voters across the country by CNN political analyst Bill Schneider
show that the November 2006 election was a vote against both
Bush and the war in Iraq. Schneider reports that voters did
not even know the name of the Democrats for whom they voted.
Voters said: "I am going to vote Democrat, because I don't
like Bush, I don't like the war. I want to make a statement."
I believe that voters recognized
that the peril of one-party rule is that political accountability
exists no where except at the ballot box. With the Republican
built and programmed electronic voting machines, even accountability
at the ballot box was disappearing.
Americans realized that they had made a serious mistake giving
power to one party, and they rectified it.
With Republican control of
the legislative branch ended, Pentagon Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
was immediately swept from power. With the troops, generals,
and the service newspapers calling for Rumsfeld's head, only
the delusional warmonger, Vice President Richard Cheney, wanted
to keep Rumsfeld in power.
It was a battle that Cheney
lost. Cheney's defeat is an indication that reality has elbowed
its way back into Republican consciousness, pushing hubris and
delusion away from the control they have exercised over political
power.
The lust for unbridled power
proved to be too strong a temptation for normally cautious Republicans.
The Republicans waved the flag and shouted "terrorist sympathizer"
at every civil libertarian who attempted to defend the US Constitution,
the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions'
proscriptions against torture, and America's reputation from
a nazified US Dept of Justice (sic) and a president who behaved--with
the approval of Republicans--as if he were above the law. In
violation of his oath of office, Bush used signing statements
to negate laws passed by Congress, not with a veto, but with
his personal opinion. Bush, thus, elevated himself above the
rule of law that has protected America from becoming a tyranny
and made a mockery of the separation of powers that are a foundation
of American liberty.
Americans may not have understood
this as clearly as the Founding Fathers did, but the people recognized,
however dimly, a problem and exercised corrective action. The
question now is: what will the Democrats do?
The Democrats clearly have
no mandate for their pet issues of gun control, homosexual marriage,
and higher taxes--especially at a time when the average American
is deeper in personal debt than at any other time in history
and jobs are being offshored at a rapid rate destroying the economic
prospects of the American people.
After the years of illegal
war and the overnight destruction of civil liberties that were
800 years in their creation, the United States stands at a watershed.
If the legislation that has been put on the books permitting
spying on Americans without a court warrant, legalizing torture
and self-incrimination, and repealing habeas corpus and the right
to an attorney remains on the books, the United States will be
a police state regardless of which party is in power.
If the Democrats are to make
a real difference, their first task is to repeal the Orwellian-named
"Patriot Acts," the torture legislation, the detention
without court evidence legislation, and the right-to-spy and
invade privacy without court warrant legislation. The White
House tyrant needs to be quickly told that one more "signing
statement" and he will be impeached, convicted, and turned
over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague.
The notion that Americans can
be protected from "terror" by giving up the Bill of
Rights is absurd. Democrats are complicit in this absurd notion.
Many were intimidated into voting for police state legislation,
because they lacked the intestinal fortitude to call police state
legislation by its own name. The legislation that has been passed
during the Bush regime is far more dangerous to Americans than
Muslim terrorists.
Indeed, the prime cause of
Muslim terrorism is the US interference in the internal affairs
of Muslim countries and America's one-sided stance in favor of
Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Jimmy Carter
was president, his even-handed approach made the US respected
throughout the Muslim world. 9/11, if it was actually an act
of Muslim terrorism, was the direct consequence of US one-sided
meddling in Middle Eastern affairs.
When, and only when, the Democrats
have erased the Bush administration's police state legislation
from the books, thus restoring the Constitution, they should
clear the air on two other issues of major importance. The Democrats
must convene a commission of independent experts to investigate
9/11. The 9/11 Commission Report has too many problems and shortcomings
to be believable.
Recent polls show that 36 percent
of the American people do not believe the report. Such a deficient
report is unacceptable. 9/11 became the excuse for the neoconservative
Bush regime to launch illegal wars of aggression in the Middle
East. The 9/11 Commission Report is nothing but a public relations
justification for the "war on terror," which in truth
is a war on American liberty. As long as politicians with a police
state mentality can cling to the cover of the 9/11 Commission
Report, the Bill of Rights will remain endangered.
The other issue is the blatant
corruption in the Bush regime's contract practices. So many
contracts are tainted with their connections to Republican power
brokers, including Vice President Richard Cheney, that the taxpayers
are being fleeced on the level of the Grant administration. Indictments
and long prison sentences are in order.
This leaves the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. Both are lost. Both invasions were illegal.
Those responsible must be held accountable.
The American prosecutors of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg
emphasized, as Robert Jackson put it, that Germany's crime was
not in losing the war but in starting it. Under the Nuremberg
standard, to launch a war of aggression is a war crime. It is
punishable with a death sentence.
As the wars are crimes, they
must be stopped. Having overthrown a stable secular regime in
Iraq, the US and its craven allies have no recourse but to accept
that Iraq will break into three states: In the north the Kurds
will unite with the Turkish Kurds, and Turkey will have to deal
with the situation without US interference. In the south, the
Shiites will have an Islamic regime similar to the government
in Iran, with whom the Iraqi Shiites will be allied. The Sunnis
will be isolated in the middle without any oil.
The US and Britain no longer
have any role to play in the Middle East. As the King of Jordan
predicted, there is now a Shiite crescent that runs from Iran
through Iraq into Lebanon. This Shiite crescent is the most
powerful force in the Middle East.
The Iraqi Sunnis can come to
terms with Shiite power or be destroyed. The American puppet
states of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the oil emirates are
faced with the instability that comes from being allied with
the "hegemonic" West against their own people. It is
up to their own wits whether they can make the transformation.
The US has neither the resources,
the finances, nor the credibility to intervene.
The Israelis have isolated
themselves with their genocidal policies against the Palestinians.
Intelligent Israelis are already sending their children out of
the country. Israeli peace groups have thrown up their hands
in the face of the persistent intransigence of the Israeli government
and the disregard of common sense. It remains to be seen if
the Israelis can learn to care about anyone but their own kind.
Israel can save itself if its political leaders will stop pushing
Palestinians off of their own land by destroying their homes
and orchards and murdering their children, thus turning more
Palestinians into refugees. It would be easy for the economically
talented Israelis to pull the Palestinians into prosperity, thereby
ending the conflict. Are Israelis capable of the humane leadership
required to create a place for themselves in the Middle East
or are they forever wed to Mao's dictum that "power comes
out of the barrel of a gun"?
Republican rule in the 21st
century has devastated American civil liberties and American
prestige and leadership capability. Can Democrats restore American
liberties and leadership, or will a lust for power corrupt them,
too, and cause Democrats to retain the police state powers Bush
has created?
If the Bush regime's police
state legislation is still law in 2008, the Democrats will have
failed.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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