Home > Senseless acts call for impeachment
Nebraskans for Peace caught a fair amount of flak last summer in calling for the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney during his whirlwind visit to Lincoln. State Republican Party Chair David Kramer, for instance, dismissed our impeachment call in an Associated Press wire story as just "gimmickry," commenting that our organization had "a history of distasteful and bizarre behavior."
We knew when we raised the call, though, what we were letting ourselves in for. Here, the capital city’s famous son was making one of his rare visits to his boyhood home (on a campaign stop to raise $150,000 for fellow Republican Jeff Fortenberry’s congressional bid), and Nebraskans for Peace was publicly accusing him of criminal misconduct. In the vice president’s hometown, in a presidential election year, with Nebraska holding the record as the most Republican state in presidential elections for more than half a century, we knew talking about impeachment wasn’t going to be popular. Given the seriousness of the issues, however, we believed somebody needed to start raising the "I-word."
If Bill Clinton’s lies about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky constituted impeachable offenses, surely (as we stated in our literature publicizing the "Impeach Cheney" rally a year ago) Cheney’s "pattern of deceit regarding the war in Iraq, suspect business dealings with Halliburton and stonewalling of Congress over the fossil fuel and nuclear industries’ influence on our national energy policy" merits equal consideration. So we raised the call and took our lumps.
Oh, but what a difference a year makes.
n The U.S. death toll has now climbed above 1,700. And more than 10,000 have been wounded.
n The price tag for the war in Iraq has ballooned to $208 billion.
n U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has declared the war against Iraq a violation of international law.
n In contrast to Cheney’s insistence that the insurgency is "in its last throes," the top military commander in the Mideast says the insurgency is as strong as ever and believes it may be as long as two years before the troop numbers can be drawn down.
n Iraq’s Justice minister is accusing the United States of hampering the preparation of the prosecution’s case against Saddam Hussein to conceal the United States’ long-term support for the dictator and former ally.
n According to CNN/USA Today/Gallup polls, 59 percent of the American public now oppose the war in Iraq, and 56 percent say going to war with Iraq wasn’t worth it. "Of those who say the war wasn’t worth it, the top reasons cited are fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found; the number of people killed and wounded; and the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States." (USA Today, 6/21/05)
n Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, who has been critical of the Bush administration’s Iraq venture from the beginning, said last week: "Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse. ... The reality is we’re losing in Iraq." He went on to state that, Republican administration or not, he would continue to speak up. "When you talk about committing a nation to war and the consequences that follow, it’s beyond party loyalty."
n And then there’s what the vice president refers to as the "so-called Downing Street memo": Eight secret British government memos that chronicle the Bush administration’s willingness to massage the data and "fix" the intelligence for a preemptive, unwarranted and illegal attack on Iraq.
One year later, impeachment doesn’t sound like such a hair-brained idea after all. And maybe it’s not organizations like Nebraskans for Peace with "a history of distasteful and bizarre behavior," but a cynical and criminal administration in Washington.
But it’s not about bragging rights, about proving who was right in the end and being able to say, "We told you so."
No, with thousands killed and wounded on both sides, and the United States’ reputation around the world in shambles, what it’s really about is standing at the state Capitol on March 19, the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, with the mother of Marine Cpl. Matt Henderson, who died May 26, 2004, in a war that did not need to be fought. It’s about standing in the cold with Becky Henderson that morning and not having anything to say to this mother about the senseless loss of her son’s life.
And if ever there was an offense worthy of impeachment, that should be it.