Barton Stone
09-12-2009, 12:43 PM
Tom Dispatch
posted 2009-09-01 15:58:27
The More Things Change by David Swanson
A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the
Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same
number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same
number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Moreover, the new president remains on the "withdrawal" schedule the
previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being
issued about whether it can even be met.
That administration also built a humongous,
three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the
most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000
"diplomats," it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq
(and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama
era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department's yearly
budget for "running" that embassy -- $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint)
in 2009 -- will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In
addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a
billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other
diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will
be a massive influx of "diplomats," and here, too, a U.S. command center
for the region is clearly being created.
What's striking are the continuities in American foreign and military
policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign
policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy.
Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same
vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the
controversial "missile defense shield" the Bush administration was
insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered
in a many-months-long Obama administration "review." While this should be
welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere -- in
Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great
military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems,
beyond consideration in Washington.
Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of the website
AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those calling for the
impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- and now for bringing them
to trial. He gives the term "activist" a good name and he's a prodigious,
energetic, thoughtful writer as well. If you're as struck by today's piece
as I was, you should consider giving his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, published on this
very day, a careful look. He's special. Tom
Bush's Third Term?
You're Living It
By David Swanson
It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine,
for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as
president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now
living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of
Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly
be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the
importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't
you just picture it?
There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still
creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still
violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of
extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with
grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even
picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing
it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas
corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture,
still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his
subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if
needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him
continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while
protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him
propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the
world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war
funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final
supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he
would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be
needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his
Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the
Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better
part of our public budget.
Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed
with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave
Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through).
His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United
States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining
current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops
to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably
also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to
use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's
tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like
Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even
be expanding the number of private security contractors in
Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with
disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John
("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at
least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and
Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people
like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of
the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political
purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like
former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor
Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.
In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in
his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd
of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would
certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term
would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around
with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the
Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign.
At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would
have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.
If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed
reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush,
the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House
with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn
such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to
release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way
of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.
During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from
Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials
responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained
untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers
during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have
gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only
low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution.
Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be
touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he
would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant
immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term
secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits,
but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than
what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would
surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast
bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden
from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with
ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of
sight.
Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is
also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following
Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of
law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what
were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama
has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course.
Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts
to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the
assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency
in its first seven months.
Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For
one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded
presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes,
lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the
obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new
Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been
strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many
progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president
and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his
doorstep.
If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more
active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats
still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote
him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him
wouldn't make all that much difference.
David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories
Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the
University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for
President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities
and hopes to see you on the road. Check out his tour schedule by
clicking here.
Copyright 2009 David Swanson
posted 2009-09-01 15:58:27
The More Things Change by David Swanson
A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the
Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same
number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same
number, in fact, used in the original invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Moreover, the new president remains on the "withdrawal" schedule the
previous administration laid out for him with the same caveats being
issued about whether it can even be met.
That administration also built a humongous,
three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar embassy in Baghdad, undoubtedly the
most expensive on the planet. Staffed with approximately 1,000
"diplomats," it was clearly meant to be a massive command center for Iraq
(and, given neocon dreams, the region). Last weekend, well into the Obama
era, the Washington Post reported that the State Department's yearly
budget for "running" that embassy -- $1.5 billion (that is not a misprint)
in 2009 -- will actually rise to $1.8 billion for 2010 and 2011. In
addition, the Obama administration now plans to invest upwards of a
billion dollars in constructing a massive embassy in Islamabad and other
diplomatic facilities in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, too, there will
be a massive influx of "diplomats," and here, too, a U.S. command center
for the region is clearly being created.
What's striking are the continuities in American foreign and military
policy, no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign
policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy.
Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same
vein. The New York Times, for instance, recently reported that the
controversial "missile defense shield" the Bush administration was
insistent on basing in Poland and the Czech Republic is being reconsidered
in a many-months-long Obama administration "review." While this should be
welcomed, the only option mentioned involved putting it elsewhere -- in
Turkey and somewhere in the Balkans. At stake is one of the great
military-industrial boondoggles of our age. Yet cancellation is, it seems,
beyond consideration in Washington.
Organizer David Swanson, founder among other things of the website
AfterDowningStreet.org, was long in the forefront of those calling for the
impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- and now for bringing them
to trial. He gives the term "activist" a good name and he's a prodigious,
energetic, thoughtful writer as well. If you're as struck by today's piece
as I was, you should consider giving his new book, Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, published on this
very day, a careful look. He's special. Tom
Bush's Third Term?
You're Living It
By David Swanson
It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine,
for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as
president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now
living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of
Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly
be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the
importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't
you just picture it?
There's Dubya now, still rewriting laws via signing statements. Still
creating and destroying laws with executive orders. And still
violating laws at his whim. Imagine Bush continuing his policy of
extraordinary rendition, sending prisoners off to other countries with
grim interrogation reputations to be held and tortured. I can even
picture him formalizing his policy of preventive detention, sprucing
it up with some "due process" even as he permanently removes habeas
corpus from our culture.
I picture this demonic president still swearing he doesn't torture,
still insisting that he wants to close Guantanamo, but assuring his
subordinates that the commander-in-chief has the power to torture "if
needed," and maintaining a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
that makes Guantanamo look like summer camp. I can imagine him
continuing to keep secret his warrantless spying programs while
protecting the corporations and government officials involved.
If Bush were in his third term, we would already have seen him
propose, yet again, the largest military budget in the history of the
world. We might well have seen him pretend he was including war
funding in the standard budget, and then claim that one final
supplemental war budget was still needed, immediately after which he
would surely announce that yet another war supplemental bill would be
needed down the road. And of course, he would have held onto his
Secretary of Defense from his second term, Robert Gates, to run the
Pentagon, keep our ongoing wars rolling along, and oversee the better
part of our public budget.
Bush would undoubtedly be following through on the agreement he signed
with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for all U.S. troops to leave
Iraq by the end of 2011 (except where he chose not to follow through).
His generals would, in the meantime, be leaking word that the United
States never intended to actually leave. He'd surely be maintaining
current levels of troops in Iraq, while sending thousands more troops
to Afghanistan and talking about a new "surge" there. He'd probably
also be escalating the campaign he launched late in his second term to
use drone aircraft to illegally and repeatedly strike into Pakistan's
tribal borderlands with Afghanistan.
If Bush were still "the decider" he'd be employing mercenaries like
Blackwater and propagandists like the Rendon Group and he might even
be expanding the number of private security contractors in
Afghanistan. In fact, the whole executive branch would be packed with
disreputable corporate executive types. You'd have somebody like John
("May I torture this one some more, please?") Rizzo still serving, at
least for a while, as general counsel at the CIA. The White House and
Justice Department would be crawling with corporate cronies, people
like John Brennan, Greg Craig, James Jones, and Eric Holder. Most of
the top prosecutors hired at the Department of Justice for political
purposes would still be on the job. And political prisoners, like
former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman and former top Democratic donor
Paul Minor would still be abandoned to their fate.
In addition, the bank bailouts Bush and his economic team initiated in
his second term would still be rolling along -- with a similar crowd
of people running the show. Ben Bernanke, for instance, would
certainly have been reappointed to run the Fed. And Bush's third term
would have guaranteed that there would be none of the monkeying around
with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that the
Democrats proposed or promised in their losing presidential campaign.
At this point in Bush's third term, no significant new effort would
have begun to restore Katrina-decimated New Orleans either.
If the Democrats in Congress attempted to pass any set of needed
reforms like, to take an example, new healthcare legislation, Bush,
the third termer, would have held secret meetings in the White House
with insurance and drug company executives to devise a means to turn
such proposals to their advantage. And he would have refused to
release the visitor logs so that the American public would have no way
of knowing just whom he'd been talking to.
During Bush's second term, some of the lowest ranking torturers from
Abu Ghraib were prosecuted as bad apples, while those officials
responsible for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib remained
untouched. If the public continued to push for justice for torturers
during the early months of Bush's third term, he would certainly have
gone with another bad apple approach, perhaps targeting only
low-ranking CIA interrogators and CIA contractors for prosecution.
Bush would undoubtedly have decreed that any higher-ups would not be
touched, that we should now be looking forward, not backward. And he
would thereby have cemented in place the power of presidents to grant
immunity for crimes they themselves authorized.
If Bush were in his third term, some of his first and second term
secrets might, by now, have been forced out into the open by lawsuits,
but what Americans actually read wouldn't be significantly worse than
what we'd already known. What documents saw the light of day would
surely have had large portions of their pages redacted, and the vast
bulk of documentation that might prove threatening would remain hidden
from the public eye. Bush's lawyers would be fighting in court, with
ever grander claims of executive power, to keep his wrongdoing out of
sight.
Now, here's the funny part. This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is
also an accurate portrait of Obama's first term to date. In following
Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of
law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what
were otherwise aberrant abuses of power. Thus far, President Obama
has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course.
Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts
to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the
assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama's presidency
in its first seven months.
Which doesn't mean there aren't differences in the two moments. For
one thing, Democrats have now joined Republicans in approving expanded
presidential powers and even -- in the case of wars, military strikes,
lawless detention and rendition, warrantless spying, and the
obstruction of justice -- presidential crimes. In addition, in the new
Democratic era of goodwill, peace and justice movements have been
strikingly defunded and, in some cases, even shut down. Many
progressive groups now, in fact, take their signals from the president
and his team, rather than bringing the public's demands to his
doorstep.
If we really were in Bush's third term, people would be far more
active and outraged. There would already be a major push to really end
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the Democrats
still wouldn't impeach Bush, especially since they'd be able to vote
him out before his fourth term, and surely four more years of him
wouldn't make all that much difference.
David Swanson is the author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the
Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories
Press, 2009). He holds a master's degree in philosophy from the
University of Virginia and served as press secretary for Kucinich for
President in 2004. Swanson is just beginning a book tour of 48 cities
and hopes to see you on the road. Check out his tour schedule by
clicking here.
Copyright 2009 David Swanson