Marshall Wittman of the Bull Moose (one of my favourite blogs and certainly one of the highlights of the centrist blogosphere) has an excellent post on “high crimes and misdemeanors” — that is, on impeachment.
His argument is that “Congressional Democrats are settling on a ‘narrative’ and a ‘frame’ for the Iraq War” that leads to an inexorable conclusion: “[A] vast conspiracy concocted a war based on lies.” Because of this, it follows, President Bush should be impeached.
The problem, Wittman argues, is that this focus on what happened before the war prevents us from focusing on what has happened during the war and subsequent occupation. So Congressional Democrats are “not pursuing the Administration’s mishandling of the war and the failure to achieve victory”. Yet “this Administration was negligent from the beginning in planning for the occupation” and “the President and the Administration grievously mismanaged the war”.
Therefore: “This Administration should be held accountable for its grave errors and incompetence without opening a wound in our political life that will be very difficult to close.” That is, the focus should be on the conduct of the war itself, not on the case made for war. Or, further, the focus should be on the gross mismanagement of the war, not on building a case for impeachment.
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I’ve previously written about impeachment here, and I respond to the Moose in this long post over at The Reaction.
I won’t repost it here, given its length, but I invite you to check it out and to offer your own comments on these two key questions (or on whatever else is on your mind):
- Should the focus be on the build-up to war (the possible manipulation of intelligence and/or outright lying) or on the war itself (the mismanagement of the occupation)?
- Should impeachment of President Bush be considered?