Monday, February 12, 2007

The Case for Impeachment, Part 1

If you want to end the war in Iraq, I think you have to impeach the President. Here's why:

Right now, the Congress merely has the power to cut off funding for the war--but in a lot of ways that is politically untenable. Republicans will be more than happy to use their media machine to punish Democrats for "cutting off funding to the troops" regardless of the fact that Bush put them in harm's way in the first place.

The President meanwhile, has a whole host of tools at his disposal. Not only can he draw up military strategy as the commander of the armed forces--he also has a whole array of diplomatic resources available to him--from the U.N. to the Secretary of State to the State Department. The problem is--he refuses to use all of the tools he has available. For him there can only be a military solution. But most experts, including the Iraq Study Group have concluded that only a negotiated political solution involving many of Iraq's neighbors will bring peace to the region.

So the Congress may have the will to end the war but not the appropriate tools to do so effectively and the President has the tools but refuses to use them. So what do we do?

Impeach Bush.

Impeach Cheney (the same day).

Speaker Pelosi becomes the President of the United States. She can immediately appoint a new cabinet--perhaps Bill Richardson as Ambassador to the United Nations, Wesley Clark as Defense Secretary, and Joe Biden as Secretary of State. Her team can immediately go to work to implement a political solution in the region while removing our troops from the front lines.

It gets the whole, "first woman President" thing out of the way. And it gets us out of Iraq through a comprehensive military and political strategy that is more likely to produce stability in the region.

Grounds for impeachment? That's easy--they lied to Congress (and the American people) about pre-war intelligence.

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