[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: The Coup d'Etat against Bush

Mon Jan 21 14:20:18 PST 2008

Saturday, January 19, 2008
The Coup d'Etat against Bush

William Pfaff

Paris, January 17, 2008 – The conspicuous irrelevance of George W. 
Bush's tour of the Middle East to any of the real forces and interests 
of the region, as well as the spooky irrelevance of nearly everything he 
said there about the alleged menace of Iran, Israel-Palestine peace, his 
fancied notions of Iraq's democratic development, and even about oil 
prices and the American economy, embarrassed his Arab hosts as well as 
the American officials and press accompanying him.

The tour – his farewell to the Middle East? -- lent weight to the 
judgment many abroad have already reached, that he no longer governs the 
United States, and indeed does not even understand its present foreign 
relationships. It is widely felt that what amounts to a coup d'etat has 
taken place in the United States, removing George Bush, without his even 
recognizing this (or at least admitting that it has occurred) from 
control over the principal issues of war and peace.

This coup has taken the form of what amounts to a mutiny of the 
professional foreign policy services of the U.S. government, acquiesced 
in by the new Secretary of Defense, the service chiefs, and Director of 
Central Intelligence Bush has himself appointed.

It was specifically carried out by the 16 recognized intelligence 
services in the American government, not as an act of law defiance, but 
by faithful execution of their duty as required by law, which is to form 
a common judgment, free from partisan pressure or interest, on matters 
vital to the nation.

The National Intelligence Estimate made known December 3, after an 
elaborate civilian and military interagency consultation, carefully 
walled off from interference by the politically partisan figures in the 
Bush administration, was presented as a fait accompli to the White 
House, the press and the nation as a whole. Its finding was that the 
claims made by the White House and others that Iran was actively 
developing nuclear weapons were untrue, contradicted by the consensus 
judgment of all the American government's intelligence agencies.

Implicit in this was a threat. This threat was that the main military 
service chiefs and their Department of Defense superiors would not act 
on a presidential order to attack Iran. This decision would not take the 
form of direct and insubordinate refusal of orders. It would be a 
refusal by the military and their chiefs to act on such an order until 
Congress had been informed and consulted, and had performed its 
constitutional duty to give formal legislative consent to acts of war.

The pathetic and pusillanimous refusal of recent American Congresses – 
and we are not simply speaking about the Congress now in office, but of 
practically every Congress since the beginning of the cold war – to 
fulfill their constitutional responsibilities with respect to the 
declaration and financing of wars, has now generated its own rebuke from 
within the executive branch of government.

Leaders in the executive branch are unwilling to act on presidential 
orders that do not carry with them the constitutionally mandated 
authority of the representative branch of government.

This is a response by the executive branch to the insistent efforts of 
the Bush White House, acting on a novel and controversial theory of 
supreme executive authority in matters of national security, to 
permanently alter the practice and disarm the legal precedents of 
American government.

This effort has thus far met little effective opposition in the 
Congress, and has in general been abetted by a judiciary intimidated by 
the powers of the Bush Justice Department, and by administration federal 
and supreme court appointments that imply that this novel theory will 
become permanently installed as the law of the land.

Judicial resistance has been rare to the administration's defiance of 
what until now have been all but universally accepted as fundamental 
norms of American government and justice: of respect for humanitarian 
precedent and treaty obligation under international law concerning 
wartime conduct towards civilians, the seizure and treatment of 
prisoners or 'detainees,' and deference to what the American Declaration 
of Independence describes as a 'decent respect to the opinions of mankind.'

The matter might also be described as a mutiny by what it is now 
customary to call the civil society, that minority of responsible 
leaders of important institutions in society itself -- the professions, 
the university, the clergy – who are willing to demand accountability of 
American government and defend American society's traditional norms of 
justice and decency.

It seems reasonable to say that as the irresponsibility of the 
Bush-Cheney government has become increasingly apparent, and in the past 
year its seeming determination to initiate another war of aggressive 
intervention in the Middle East became evident, with manifest risk of 
provoking regional conflict embroiling the United States for years to 
come, a consensus has emerged in American elite opinion that has lent 
authority to mutiny inside the government.

I am perhaps taking a romantic and unjustified view of what has 
happened. I hope not. I believe that only grave malfeasance in 
government and unconstitutional conduct justify an executive 'coup 
d'etat' – however 'postmodern' the form that it assumes, and however 
elevated its motives.

However I would suggest that the present election campaign demonstrates 
that powerful forces in the Washington political and foreign policy 
communities, reinforced by financial and industrial interests, are 
committed to suppressing all challenge to policies that already have 
altered the political character of the United States. The American form 
of government itself needs to be defended.

Posted by Snuffysmith at 8:57 AM
-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
Latest change: added Cindy Sheehan Impeachment Press conference picts.
I recommend voting for Cynthia McKinney on Feb 5th in the Green Primary!