September 30, 2003
Scandalgate
Having weathered the uproar over the Sixteen Words, the Bush Administration is now embroiled, as we all know, in its offshoot.
News of the Justice Department's launching of a "full-blown criminal investigation" into the matter has touched off a "press stampede".
The leading left-leaning blogs -- Talking Points Memo, This Modern World, Eschaton, Whiskey Bar, Kos, Calpundit, et al., are circling over the story like vultures.
Perhaps this, that, or the other scandal will bring down the Bush dynasty. Then, wither his Administration's fallen angels? The similarities to Watergate may be instructive.
The Nixon Administration was brought down not because of its part in the barbaric Indochina wars and the toppling of Allende, for example. It was brought down for some relatively minor (infinitely minor, compared with its Indochina wars), bumbling party-politic shenanigans.
Spake America's senior representative to the Nuremberg trials, in August 1945:
For the first time, four of the most powerful nations have agreed not only upon the principles of liability for war crimes of prosecution, but also upon the principle of individual responsibility for the crime of attacking the international peace.
Repeatedly, nations have united in abstract declarations that the launching of aggressive war is illegal. They have condemned it by treaty. But now we have the concrete application of these abstractions in a way which ought to make clear to the world that those who lead their nations into aggressive war face individual accountability for such acts.
And:
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
It was the "crime of attacking the international peace" for which the German and Japanese leaders were hanged. No such fate awaited the architects of the savage deeds visited upon Indochina -- indeed, Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, yet today walks around a free man, and is considered a kind of sage on matters of diplomacy and foreign policy.
And it is for the "crime of attacking the international peace" that the architects of the Bush Wars should be imprisoned for a very, very long time. The Camp X-Ray "treatment" is probably too good for the miscreants who've murdered tens of thousands (and counting), and littered two countries with radioactive dust and unexploded ordnance.
Not to minimise the criminal nature of the Wilsongate leakings, but if the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia are the Bush Administration's highest crimes and "misdemeanors", there are any number of crimes -- the Administration's environmental policies chief among them -- of far greater import, but which aren't even on the radar.
Yet through it all, if the Bush Administration is finally undone by its own corruption and hubris, the greatest conceivable punishment is that Dubya will be forced to retire to his ranch to watch teevee and eat pretzels all the day long.
As an aside, it might also be interesting to note the Clinton Administration's reaction to a scandal wrought by deeds so trivial they're hardly worth discussion: a major act of state terrorism -- namely, the four-day round-the-clock bombing of Iraq known as "Desert Fox" -- that set back impeachment proceedings by three or four days. Yet when the proceedings picked back up again, not a peep was heard regarding the crime (one among many, more accurately stated) that should have seen Clinton off to the slammer "until the end of time".
Posted by Eddie Tews at September 30, 2003 03:48 PM
Comments
The leading left-leaning blogs -- Talking Points Memo, This Modern World, Eschaton, Whiskey Bar, Kos, Calpundit, et al., are circling over the story like vultures.
Well I have been feeling a bit peckish lately. -- Posted by: Billmon on October 2, 2003 01:59 PM
Nixon wanted to fire bomb a federal building. I certainly wouldn't call that minor. -- Posted by: Sullivan on October 30, 2003 05:56 PM