The Mideastization of the US, or: Rumsfeld Must Resign

Juan Cole will be on CNN today between 5 and 6 pm with Wolf Blitzer.

The Mideastization of the US, or:
Rumsfeld Must Resign

The Bush administration keeps talking about bringing democracy to the Middle East, but a key element in democracy is always the accountability of public officials to the public. That is why we have elections, that is why we have a division of powers, that is why Congress can impeach the executive and the Supreme Court could order Nixon to hand over his tape recordings. When high officials commit improprieties, they must resign. When they run a loose ship and it founders on the shoals of scandal, they must resign. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz must resign. It is the only way the United States can recover even a shred of credibility in the wider world, at a time when this country desperately needs the esteem and the cooperation of allies and friends.

The Bush administration has from its inception stood against accountability. When Ambassador Joe Wilson blew the whistle on the phony Niger yellowcake story that Bush put in his state of the union address to stampede us all into war, someone high in the Bush administration took petty revenge by revealing that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert CIA operative. Plame's specialty was attempting to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. When the Bush administration revealed her name to the public, it compromised all her contacts in all the countries she had ever worked, and set back the fight against proliferation. This action was high treason. Bush could demand that the individual responsible come forward. He has not done so.

When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, no Bush administration official was asked to resign. The main purveyor of false intelligence on Iraqi WMD was Vice President Dick Cheney. He has not been asked to step down, even though he was largely responsible for taking the country to war based on a falsehood. Scooter Libby, David Wurmser and John Hannah were up to their necks in hyping bad intelligence on Iraqi WMD. None of them was asked to step down. They were supplied the bad intelligence by Undersecretary of Defense for Planning Douglas Feith and his rogue Office of Special Plans. No one associated with this scam has been asked to resign.

It is clear where the buck stops with regard to torture by the US military. It stops with the Secretary of Defense (and with the President, but he in any case is facing accountability in November). Moreover, Rumsfeld is not an innocent bystander in all this. His policies have consistently aimed at creating spaces for prisoners to be outside any judicial jurisdiction, so that anything can be done to them with impunity. I remember seeing a news conference where a British journalist complained about the US practice of hooding prisoners as a form of torture. Rumsfeld absolutely ridiculed her. "Hooding?" He asked sarcastically. The torture of POWs at Abu Ghuraib was not carried out by a handful of rogue MPs. It was the result of ordinary practices of US military intelligence, practices that just haven't usually been photographed. Rumsfeld set the tone in which military intelligence felt justified in behaving this way.

http://www.juancole.com/

I've been following Juan Cole for some time, and think he's the best blogger on Iraq, bar none. His basic point, the the malAdministration has turned the U.S. into a Middle Eastern Republic, rather than exporting American-style (idealized) Democracy to that region, has captured the essence of the last three years.

That, coupled with Anthony Lewis' column in the New York Times this morning titled, "A President Beyond the Law", pretty well sums up the mess we're in. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07LEWI.html