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Huffington Post via Common Dreams - Nov 1, 2007
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/01/4948/

The Power of Inspection and the Claim of Impeachment

by David Bromwich

Last night's Democratic debate marked the first time a number of
candidates have spoken sanely and frankly about the Cheney-Bush design
for a world war. Tim Russert asked each candidate to "pledge" to
prevent Iran from developing the capacity to make a nuclear weapon. A
mindless and demagogic request, and an attempt to corral the Democratic
party into the militarism which holds the Republican candidates (with
the exception of Ron Paul) captive and cheering. Russert was out of
line and someone should have told him so. Yet the responses were
instructive.

Hillary Clinton vowed to do all she could to prevent Iran from
acquiring a weapon; when that proved not ripe enough for her
questioner, she made it clear she would not please him by upping the
ante. What he was after was a pledge to initiate a war by bombing Iran.

Joe Biden explained to Russert that the Middle East holds perils more
ominous than the possible attainment of a nuclear weapon by Iran some
years from now. Biden did not mention Israel's 200 nuclear weapons, or
its second-strike capacity from submarines.

He did bring up Pakistan: another nuclear power, and one whose upheaval
would have consequences the U.S. cannot possibly reckon. By his answer,
Biden was contributing to the education of the public. They surely
hadn't heard before a sober comparison of Pakistan with Iran, whether
from Tim Russert or his colleagues at ABC or what remains of CBS.

The education continued with a fine response by John Edwards that
addressed the Cheney-Bush pattern of saber-rattling against Iran.
Edwards showed how the pair were following the same protocol that
created a stupefied popular consensus against Iraq in 2003. He also
used the word "neocon": a word that many of his listeners might have a
broad idea of; more of them, probably, a dim and faint idea. The mere
mention of this faction constitutes of a public service, now that they
are running not only the president's foreign policy but the policy
apparatus of four Republican candidacies (Giuliani, McCain, Romney,
Thompson). Next time, Edwards ought to give a name or two, and connect
it with a policy. For the individuals he has in mind are as persistent
and remorseless as they are destructive. Their previous field of
exercise was Nicaragua.

Chris Dodd offered a vivid recollection of the disaster of Iran-Contra
when he recalled his part in negotiating a diplomatic end to the
artificially induced civil war in Nicaragua: a war that was begun in
America's name but funded and commandeered in defiance of the law. If
Dodd alludes to Nicaragua again, he might mention that the earlier war
was fought by American proxies with the tactics of terrorism; that it
was a war that ripped apart a society and by its end had killed 30,000;
and that it was run from the department of state by the same reckless
functionary, Elliott Abrams, who pulls the levers now on American
policy in the Middle East. The next time you hear (Dodd could easily
say) about an assassination that heats up civil strife in Lebanon with
profit to no party in Lebanon, or the latest speculative charge against
Iran by the White House, or reports of advanced armaments suddenly in
use by Fatah militias, or an Israeli bombing of a supposed nuclear site
in Syria, where no evidence is given and no radioactive residue
appears-be forewarned that you are seeing the handiwork of Elliott
Abrams. This is an administration that has everything to fear from the
diffusion of facts. But the facts need to be recited slowly, and the
history needs to be recounted with patience.

Dennis Kucinich spoke the word impeachment. Whatever the Democrats may
do, it is an idea the party would be irresponsible not to consider. No
one who has read the Constitution through the minds of the founders,
and followed the history of the past seven years, can doubt that the
vice president and the president have committed impeachable offenses.
The violation of FISA and the development of a secret policy for
circumventing the FISA court are only the clearest instances. The
withdrawal of the U.S., in secret, from the Geneva conventions,
embodies the same insolence and arrogation. The power of inspection by
the Senate and the claim of impeachment have long been understood as
the indispensable checks against abuse of power by an ambitious
executive.

Against impeachment, there is this to be said, that the majority
apparently lack the votes to make it succeed. Yet Nancy Pelosi showed a
remarkable absence of political mind when, as the leader of a new
majority in a critical time, facing a president out of control, she
declared that impeachment was not an option. You don't reassure an
opponent-especially an opponent who understands nothing but the
language of force-that the one weapon he rightly fears has been taken
out of your arsenal. Besides, there are powers of inspection short of
impeachment, which the Democratic Congress has been inexplicably
backward in using. Dick Cheney has never held a press conference, and
has seldom been asked to answer a question. His chief of staff, David
Addington, is unknown on Capitol Hill. Why have they never been called
to testify? Say by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (for
misconduct in the control of post-invasion Iraq)? Or the Senate
Intelligence Committee (for the slanting of estimates on Iraq in
2002-03, on Iran in 2006, on Syria in 2007)? Or by the Judiciary
Committee (for overturning in secret the constitutional ban on torture
and the legal restrictions on domestic surveillance)? When one thinks
of the public education on the war in Vietnam that was supplied by the
Foreign Relations Committee under Senator William Fulbright, nothing
except timidity and a failure of self-respect can explain the omission
of such hearings today.

The preferred way in to a world war, as Alastair Crooke pointed out in a
recent and disturbing article, may not be a direct attack on Iran, but a
"back door" through any of the potential flash-points the vice
president has been preparing in the region. It may come from Lebanon,
or from the Kurds, or an alarm set off by Israel and the argument that
we have to cover what Israel "had" to do. All fanatics are dangerous;
and not all of them know this about themselves; but the fanatics of
this administration and their propagandists, do indeed know it, and
they have begun to turn "dangerous" into a term of praise. They truly
believe the surest way to reform the Middle East is to revolutionize
the entire region through the engineered collapse of several
governments at once, or in close succession. A much larger war
triggered by accident, and a mounting series of escalations, would also
bury their responsibility in the confusion, chaos, and desolation that
followed.

But to carry it off they need the American people to be their
accomplices. And that is where the salutary shadow of impeachment may
matter. Even if it remains a discussion only, the threat could remind
the public, and give notice to TV presenters innocent of political
knowledge, that there is an unpleasant smell, a suspicion probably
worth exploring, about the familiar crooked path to the next war. There
is something finally neither admirable nor laughable about the men who
have done these things to our country.

[David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale. He has written on politics
and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of
Books, and other magazines. He is editor of Edmund Burke's selected
writings ON EMPIRE, LIBERTY, AND REFORM and co-editor of the Yale
University Press edition of ON LIBERTY.]
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