The ‘Surge’ Is ‘Working’? Fine. Then Bush Should Be Impeached.

by John Hawkins | December 3, 2007 5:30 am

This column, from David Michael Green at the Smirking Chimp[1] is a real eye catcher because if we could get enough liberals to buy into this thinking feeling, we might be able to get more of them to pull a Murtha and acknowledge that the surge is working,

But let’s forget all that, and, just for the sake of discussion, assume Little Bush has achieved something worthwhile in Iraq during 2007. Shouldn’t he be recognized for his achievement?

No. He should be impeached.

Some may claim that he has committed no crime related to Iraq (that’s actually an endless list, but don’t get me started). For those folks, it is well to remember that an impeachable offense is, as Gerry Ford once aptly reminded us, anything that a majority of the House of Representatives believes it to be on any given day. I’m not one who believes that this nuclear warhead of constitutional government should be used lightly, but surely we can all agree that gross incompetence and negligence are well within the range of what constitutes an impeachable offense. Imagine if the country had a president who had gone barking mad in his first year of office, and was making reckless decisions that were grievously harming us. Would anyone argue that these behaviors didn’t rise to the level of impeachable offense, and that the country should endure another three years of serious damage because insanity wasn’t a high crime or misdemeanor? Heck, would anyone argue that gross incompetence and negligence aren’t impeachable offenses when lying about oral sex is? (Okay – I mean anyone besides those people?)

If the surge is working, Bush should be impeached precisely for the reason that it is working. This is a president who was told by at least two top generals in the military that he would need additional forces in Iraq in order to succeed in his objectives. Notice that they were not saying that the war was immoral or even a bad policy choice. They were simply arguing that to effectively achieve the political objectives Bush was pursuing, he would, in their professional opinion, need a much greater level of force presence. Notice that the same president who today incessantly hides behind the supposed force requirements of his generals, falsely claiming to defer to their military judgement, not only disastrously failed to adhere to this advice in 2003, but went so far as to cashier these career officials out of the military and destroy their careers instead in order to send a warning to anyone else stupid enough to be so candid.

Okay, so he’s a liar and a hypocrite. That ain’t exactly headline news. But here’s the larger point: If the surge is working, it would have worked a lot better had Bush listened to Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and others back at the beginning. The fact that he did not demonstrates gross misjudgement which quite likely has meant the difference between a stupid and ill-advised war that might have ended quickly and relatively painlessly, on the one hand, versus a stupid and ill-advised war that will probably never end and has taken over a million lives so far, on the other. However ironic it certainly is, it is nevertheless indisputable that the very ‘success’ of the ‘surge’, such as it is, is therefore actually an indictment of Bush. It proves how dangerously wrong he was when he rejected precisely this advice even before the war was launched. The results of that failure of judgement have been astronomically huge and catastrophically disastrous. Anyone guilty of such egregious errors has no business being commander-in-chief, his slimy fingers gripping the nuclear trigger. If the surge is a success, Bush should be impeached for gross incompetence.

Wow, the liberal mind at work is a real wonder to behold, isn’t it?

We changed strategies, the change worked, and therefore Bush should be impeached. Of course, by that standard, the President in charge of every major war we’ve ever fought could be impeached because we changed strategy in some form or fashion in every one of them at some point.

PS: Should I even have written that last paragraph? Is it even necessary to refute something like this? Given that the most ridiculous ideas and conspiracy theories are taken seriously on the Left and even on certain parts of the Right (See the North American Union and the amero that Bush is supposedly going to implement next year), it’s hard to tell sometimes.

Endnotes:
  1. Smirking Chimp: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11310

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