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An Impartial Interrogation of George W. Bush
By George McGovern
The Nation, Wednesday 17 January 2007
As reported on http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011907B.shtml
I'm glad to be back at the National Press Club. Indeed, at the age of
eighty-four, I'm glad to be anywhere. In my younger years when the
subject of aging came up, trying to sound worldly wise, I would say, "It
doesn't matter so much the number of years you have, but what you do
with those years." I don't say that anymore. I now want to reach a
hundred. Why? Because I thoroughly enjoy life and there are so many
things I must still do before entering the mystery beyond. The most
urgent of these is to get American soldiers out of the Iraqi hellhole
Bush-Cheney and their neoconservative theorists have created in what was
once called the cradle of civilization. It is believed to be the
location of the Garden of Eden. I mention the neoconservative theorists
to recall Walter Lippman's observance, "There is nothing so dangerous as
a belligerent professor."
One of the things I miss about my eighteen years in the US Senate is
the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I didn't always vote with
them, but I loved their technique of responding to an opponent's
questions with a humorous story. Once when Senator Sam Ervin of North
Carolina had to handle a tough question from Mike Mansfield, he said,
"You know, Mr. Leader, that question reminds me of the old Baptist
preacher who was telling a class of Sunday school boys the creation
story. 'God created Adam and Eve and from this union came two sons, Cain
and Abel and thus the human race developed.' A boy in the class then
asked, 'Reverend, where did Cain and Abel get their wives?' After
frowning for a moment, the preacher replied, 'Young man-it's impertinent
questions like that that's hurtin' religion.'"
Well, Mr. Bush, Jr. I have some impertinent questions for you.
Mr. President, Sir, when reporter Bob Woodward asked you if you had
consulted with your father before ordering our army into Iraq you said,
"No, he's not the father you call on a decision like this. I talked to
my heavenly Father above." My question, Mr. President: If God asked you
to bombard, invade and occupy Iraq for four years, why did he send an
opposite message to the Pope? Did you not know that your father, George
Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker and his National Security
Advisor General Scowcroft were all opposed to your invasion? Wouldn't
you, our troops, the American people and the Iraqis all be much better
off if you had listened to your more experienced elders including your
earthly father? Instead of blaming God for the awful catastrophe you
have unleashed in Iraq, wouldn't it have been less self-righteous if you
had fallen back on the oft-quoted explanation of wrongdoing, "The devil
made me do it?"
And Mr. President, after the 9/11 hit against the Twin Towers in New
York, which gained us the sympathy and support of the entire world, why
did you then order the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with
9/11? Are you aware that your actions destroyed the international
reservoir of good will towards the United States? What is the cost to
America of shattering the standing and influence of our country in the
eyes of the world?
Why, Mr. President did you pressure the CIA to report falsely that
Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons?
And when you ordered your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to go to New
York and present to the UN the Administration's "evidence" that Iraq was
an imminent nuclear threat to the United States, were you aware that
after reading this deceitful statement to the UN, Mr. Powell told an aid
that the so-called evidence was "bullshit"?
Is it reasonable to you, President Bush, that Colin Powell told you
near the end of your first term that he would not be in your
Administration if you were to receive a second term? What decent person
could survive two full terms of forced lying and deceit?
And Mr. President, how do you enjoy your leisure time, and how can
you sleep at night knowing that 3,014 young Americans have died in a war
you mistakenly ordered? What do you say to the 48,000 young Americans
who have been crippled for life in mind or body? What is your reaction
to the conclusion of the leading British medical journal (Lancet) that
since you ordered the bombardment and occupation of Iraq four years ago,
600,000 Iraqi men, women and children have been killed? What do you
think of the destruction of the Iraqi's homes, their electrical and
water systems, their public buildings?
And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while neither of you has ever been in
combat (Mr. Cheney asking and receiving five deferments from the Vietnam
War), have you not at least read or been briefed on the terrible costs
of that ill-advised and seemingly endless American war in tiny Vietnam?
Do you realize that another Texas President, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
declined to seek a second term in part because he had lost his
credibility over the disastrous war in Vietnam? Are you aware that one
of the chief architects of that war, Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara, resigned his office and years later published a book declaring
that the war was all a tragic mistake? Do you know this recent history
in which 58,000 young Americans died in the process of killing 2 million
Vietnamese men, women and children? If you do not know about this
terrible blunder in Vietnam, are you not ignoring the conclusion of one
of our great philosophers: "Those who are ignorant of history are
condemned to repeat it." And, Mr. President, in your ignorance of the
lessons of Vietnam, are you not condemning our troops and our people to
repeat the same tragedy in Iraq?
During the long years between 1963 and 1975 when I fought to end the
American war in Vietnam, first as a US Senator from South Dakota and
then as my party's nominee for President, my four daughters ganged up on
my one night. "Dad, why don't you give up this battle? You've been
speaking out against this crazy war since we were little kids. When you
won the Democratic presidential nomination, you got snowed under by
President Nixon." In reply I said, "Just remember that sometimes in
history even a tragic mistake produces something good. The good about
Vietnam is that it is such a terrible blunder, we'll never go down that
road again." Mr. President, we're going down that road again. So, what
do I tell my daughters? And what do you tell your daughters?
Mr. President, I do not speak either as a pacifist or a draft dodger.
I speak as one who after the attack on Pearl Harbor, volunteered at the
age of nineteen for the Army Air Corps and flew thirty-five missions as
a B-24 bomber. I believed in that war then and I still do sixty-five
years later. And so did the rest of America. Mr. President, are you
missing the intellectual and moral capacity to know the difference
between a justified war and a war of folly in Vietnam or Iraq?
Public opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the American people
think that the war in Iraq has been a mistake on your part. It is widely
believed that this war was the central reason Democrats captured control
of both houses of Congress. Polls among the people of Iraq indicate that
nearly all Iraqis want our military presence in their country for the
last four years to end now. Why do you persist in defying public opinion
in both the United States and Iraq and throughout the other countries
around the globe? Do you see yourself as omniscient? What is your view
of the doctrine of self-determination, which we Americans hold dear?
And wonder of wonders, Mr. President, after such needless death and
destruction, first in the Vietnamese jungle and now in the Arabian
Desert, how can you order 21,500 more American troops to Iraq? Are you
aware that as the war in Vietnam went from bad to worse, our leaders
sent in more troops and wasted more billions of dollars until we had
550,000 US troops in that little country? It makes me shudder as an
aging bomber pilot to remember that we dropped more bombs on the
Vietnamese and their country than the total of all the bombs dropped by
all the air forces around the world in World War II. Do you, Mr.
President, honestly believe that we need tens of thousands of additional
troops plus a supplemental military appropriation of $200 billion before
we can bring our troops home from this nightmare in ancient Baghdad?
In your initial campaign for the Presidency, Mr. Bush, you described
yourself as a "compassionate conservative". What is compassionate about
consigning America's youth to a needless and seemingly endless war that
has now lasted longer than World War II? And what is conservative about
reducing the taxes needed to finance this war and instead running our
national debt to nine trillion dollars with money borrowed from China,
Japan, Germany and Britain? Is this wild deficit financing your idea of
conservatism? Mr. President, how can a true conservative be indifferent
to the steadily rising cost of a war that claims over $7 billion a
month, $237 million every day? Are you troubled to know as a
conservative that just the interest on our skyrocketing national debt is
$760,000 every day. Mr. President, our Nobel Prize-winning economist,
Joseph Stiglitz, estimates that if the war were to continue until 2010
as you have indicated it might, the cost would be over a trillion
dollars.
Perhaps, Mr. President, you should ponder the words of a genuine
conservative - England's nineteenth-century member of Parliament, Edmund
Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood".
And, Mr. President at a time when your most respected generals have
concluded that the chaos and conflict in Iraq cannot be resolved by more
American dollars and more American young bodies, do you ever consider
the needs here at home of our own anxious and troubled society? What
about the words of another true conservative, General and President
Dwight Eisenhower who said that, "Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from
those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed."
And, Mr. President, would not you and all the rest of us do well to
ponder the farewell words of President Eisenhower: "In the councils of
government, we must guard against the acquisition of the unwarranted
influence of the military-industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Finally, Mr. President, I ask have you kept your oath of office to
uphold the Constitution when you use what you call the war on terrorism
to undermine the Bill of Rights? On what constitutional theory do you
seize and imprison suspects without charge, sometimes torturing them in
foreign jails? On what constitutional or legal basis have you tapped the
phones of Americans without approval of the courts as required by law?
Are you above the Constitution, above the law, and above the Geneva
accords? If we are fighting for freedom in Iraq as you say, why are you
so indifferent to protecting liberty here in America?
Many Americans are now saying in effect, "The American war in Iraq
has created a horrible mess but how can we now walk away from it?"
William Polk, a former Harvard and University of Chicago professor of
Middle East Studies and a former State Department expert on the Middle
East, has teamed up with me on a recent book requested by Simon and
Schuster. It is entitled, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal
Now. I feel awkward praising it, so I give you the respected journalist
of the New York Times, and now of Newsweek, Anna Quindlen who told
Charlie Rose on his excellent TV program: "There is a wonderful book I
am recommending to everyone. It's a very small, readable book by George
McGovern and William Polk called Out of Iraq. And it just very quickly
runs you through the history of the country, the makeup of the country,
how we got in, the arguments for getting in-many of which don't
withstand scrutiny-and how we can get out. It's like a little primer. I
think the entire nation should read it and then we will be united."
If you need a second for the judgment of Anna Quindlen, I give you
the esteemed Library Journal: "In this crisp and cogently argued book,
former Senator McGovern and scholar Polk offer a trenchant and
straightforward critique of the war in Iraq. What makes their highly
readable book unique is that it not only argues why the United States
needs to disengage militarily from Iraq now...but also clearly
delineates practical steps for troop withdrawal...Essential reading for
anybody who wants to cut through the maze of confusion that surrounds
current US policy in Iraq, this book is highly recommended for public
and academic libraries."
Professor Polk is a descendant of President Polk and the brother of
the noted George Polk, is here today from his home in southern France
and he will join me at the podium as I conclude this impartial
interrogation of President Bush. And now, members of the National Press
Club and your guests, it's your turn to cross-examine Bill Polk and me
in, of course, an equally impartial manner.
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