Nothing new under the sun

Last night I made a visit to Truthout to see what was new and had an "Oh-Shit" moment. Those of us on the left have been reacting with surprised indignation at the lies, deceit and un-American activities of the Bush administration and Rethuglican lawmakers. I really should say those of us who haven't been drinking the Kool-Aid since we have been joined by many members of the "old" right.

At Truthout I found Worse than Watergate? The Mother of All Constitutional Crises by Judith Coburn who as a young reporter covered the Vietnam war and Watergate. I suddenly realized I shouldn't be surprised by what the Bush administration has done but I should be indignant and very afraid. I shouldn't be surprised because at 59 I remember Vietnam and Watergate very well. Ms Coburn starts with a brief history of what was going on nearly 40 years ago in this country.

On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig laughing.")

The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.

That's right, Nixon was not impeached for something far more serious than covering up a burglary but he should have been. Congress hasn't changed much in 40 years has it?

Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct which seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell wrote of "the distortions in the conduct of the presidency which deformed national politics in the Vietnam years - the isolation from reality, the rage against political opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive action." He concluded that three presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs."

To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.

Nixon's impeachment didn't avert a constitutional crisis but since he was impeached for the wrong crime it only postponed it.

It would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system," Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing to go to defy Congress. Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the Reagan Administration.)

Now, once again, ideologues - this time formerly anti-communist neoconservatives - have taken America into another foreign war, whose pretext was as flimsy as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by the relatively minuscule number of American casualties in Iraq as they were by the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam and just as blind to the suffering of Iraqis as they were to the millions of Indochinese who died.

I have not done Judith Coburn's article justice with a few cut and pastes so go read the entire thing. Also head over to the original source at TomDispatch.com and read Tom Engelhardt's excellent introduction.