No More Blank Checks for Bush
Today, denial, bluster, deceit, and the cynical partisanship of the GOP are no longer protecting Bush from the consequences of his failures.
Regardless of the nuances, elisions, hypocrisy, or political calculation behind the Senate’s moves to limit torture, define habeus corpus for enemy combatant detainees, and demand presidential accountability to the legislative branch on progress in Iraq, the message is clear.
The imperial presidency that pretended it embodied virtue, omniscience, and the national will has destroyed itself by the self-inflicted wounds of Iraq, Katrina, and Plamegate.
The fact that the debates over detention without due process and limits to physical coercion occurred at all is a declaration by the establishment of no confidence in Bush’s ability to exercise these dangerous powers responsibly.
If Bush can’t be trusted to run Gulag, Inc. right, it’s hard to imagine he should be allowed to run our wars, our economy, or our social programs without Congress looking over his shoulder.
The Bush administration is now subject to adult supervision.
Almost overnight, the whole issue of institutional checks and balances — conspicuously MIA between 2002 and 2004 - has returned.
And it couldn’t happen soon enough. A metastasizing national security regime fanatically shielded from oversight and under the nominal command of a venal idiot yielded its inevitable harvest — chaos, corruption, and profound moral confusion.
The power to make war, to detain without habeus corpus, and coerce testimony is an awful responsibility, not a right.
That dreadful power demands restraint, oversight, and transparency, not license, secrecy, and the contemptible assertion that challenging the actions and policies of the executive branch is unpatriotic.
The success and the durability of the American system resides in large part to the open, independent, and empowered institutions that limit the evil that men and women can do — especially when they are in positions of power and loudly professing the nobility of their aims and methods.
Democracy does not say we are above torture. It acknowledges that we are capable of it, and seeks to prevent it — by rights, laws, and checks and balances.
When the executive branch claims torture as its right, and a right that it can exercise untrammeled, abuse is inherent in the system.
And when the powers to detain and interrogate are claimed as an exclusive right by a moral imbecile, one George W. Bush, rampant abuses are inevitable.
It is almost laughable that Bush is striving so earnestly to reserve for his office the awful powers he has shown himself so manifestly unfit to exercise.
But Bush’s cupidity is only half the story. He arrogated power to the executive branch because we, the American people, let him have it.
Bush’s War on Terror beguiled the American people with its reassuring, simple good guys vs. bad guys rhetoric. As virtuous victims (remember, they attacked us because They Hate Our Freedoms), we deluded ourselves into thinking our reaction was by definition virtuous, and the issue of checks and balances went out the window. Reveling in the victim mentality, our moral responsibilities became conditional, relative, and disposable, not only in the prison, but on the battlefield.
The American people fell into a moral trap. Maybe that's why so many people still find it hard to grasp the central issue in the torture debate — that we have given the right to detain and torture without recourse to corrupt, incompetent leaders, the bankrupt national security regime they have created, and an increasingly demoralized collection of spooks, contractors, and grunts doing the dirty work in the field.
We accepted Bush "good vs. evil" narrative of the war on terror while disregarding its central fallacy. It ignores the fact that Americans come in all moral hues — the good, the bad, the ugly, and the in-between.
Proclaiming the righteousness of our cause by no means guaranteed the righteousness of our actions, especially when our supreme leader embodied most of our nation’s flaws and few of our virtues.
Up until now, the victim mentality is still strong within us. Like George W. Bush, we are not yet willing to take responsibility for our actions, confront the consequences, and apply the checks and balances that the world has a right to demand of the world's only superpower.
This moral abdication is evident in the unctuous Support Our Troops rhetoric shared by Left and Right, that turns a blind eye to the role of our armies in devastating not just the lives of a few thousand genuine bad guys, suspicious characters, and pathetic innocents swept up in the net of our detention and interrogation apparatus, but whole chunks of the world.
We have abdicated our responsibilities as citizens, gutted our institutions of oversight, and allowed our moral authority to be held hostage by our soldiers — the subset of citizens of our nation that includes in unknown proportions heroic patriots, an admixture of amoral time-servers, and some psychopaths who like to dress up in uniforms and shoot people, but whose most salient shared characteristic is the willingness to kill.
We have given our armies, virtually unchecked, the power of life and death, not only over men and women but cities and nations. We easily fell prey to the comforting delusion that we as a nation and our soldiers, individually and as a group, embodied virtue and therefore should be allowed to apply the ultimate sanction against human life without acknowledging that they can — and probably will — do wrong.
However, the War on Terror under the uncertain leadership of George W. Bush has not brought us the easy, satisfying victories and accolades of the subjugated and occupied that might reassure us of our unassailable virtue.
Instead, the spectacle of US violence, intimidation, and terror, callously and incompetently applied, has degraded our fighting forces and tarnished this nation’s honor.
It’s not just grunts and spooks. The American people also feel this moral drift, a sense of the rot in Iraq and throughout our growing worldwide gulag and beneath our feet at home in America — and in our leadership.
That’s why the majority of the country no longer believes in the personal integrity of our Commander-in-Chief, our mission in Iraq…or that this nation is on the right track.
We’ve traveled far down a bloody road of fallacy and lies. The capability to admit error, to return to the traditional values of our nation and the striving after good — instead of the arrogant assumption that we embody it — offers us a way back.
The true test of democracy is not fighting evil abroad. It lies in confronting evil at home.
The real debate should be, why, after its bad faith, lies, and spectacular failures, the Bush administration still tries to place the executive branch above the law and beyond oversight as leader of a self-proclaimed Global War on Terror?
Accountability matters. Not just to assign blame for the past. But to restore the system of democratic checks and balances that protects us and the world against the frailties and follies of our leaders and can establish a clear, reassuring path to the future that will guide America out of the moral wilderness of the Bush years.
Perhaps in a few years we can look back on this period in history with amazement and bewilderment and ask:
How could we think that we could give a vulgar, incapable princeling the unchecked power to turn the world into our battlefield and our prison, deny people everywhere the physical security and human rights that make life worth living…
…and convince ourselves against all odds, evidence, and logic that this was the wonderful new way that the world could be organized?
The depth of our shock and wonder will be a sign of how far we have come since the dark days of the Bush administration.
Copyright 2005 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
