Impeaching Bush

Enough is enough. Before George W Bush leads the world into greater catastrophes yet, he should be legally removed, writes Hassan Nafaa*

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Perhaps more than any other in the world, the US system of government is equipped with robust methods for enforcing the application of and respect for the rule and processes of law. The best testimony to this was the Watergate scandal. On 27 June 1972, the FBI arrested five individuals caught in the act of planting wiretaps in the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building in Washington. When the trail of evidence surrounding this illegal activity led directly to the Oval Office, Congress initiated impeachment proceedings against the president. Anticipating the inevitable conclusion of those proceedings Richard Nixon tendered his resignation in August 1974.

Nixon had been no run-of-the-mill president. It was he who had brought an end to the Vietnam War, normalised relations with China and augmented the US influence in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab- Israeli War of October 1973. None of these achievements came to his aid at the time of the Watergate hearings, especially when it came to light how brazenly he had lied to the American people who, in November 1972, had elected him to a second term of office, which would have ended in 1976.

One cannot help but admire a system of government that is so well equipped with mechanisms for investigating misconduct on the part of the holder of the highest office of the land, and unseating him if necessary. When one compares Nixon's misdeeds with those of Bush today, one cannot help but to wonder whether these mechanisms will be set into motion again, thereby delivering the people of the US and the rest of the world from his immense evils.

Naturally, this is not the first time this question has occurred to me. However, whenever I started to contemplate it before I felt that my personal feelings were getting the better of me and dismissed it. I have this set image of Bush being deficient in thought and probably innately deficient in mind. Until November 2004, I entertained the hope that the American people would not re-elect this president. At the time I wrote, "if the American people renew their confidence in Bush, their decision can only mean one thing: that the immune system of the American political system has broken down and that American democracy has succumbed to viruses of the neo-conservatives who will not release their grip on it until it dies. If, on the other hand, the American people decide to oust the current president, whom they have tested over the past four years, this decision will herald the end of the age of the neo-cons and, perhaps, the beginning of the collapse of their evangelistic imperialist project."

Since then I have become only more confirmed in my conviction that my image of Bush is accurate and that he is totally unqualified to lead the US and the world. Moreover, having kept close track of his behaviour over the foregoing year, I am thoroughly convinced that if he remains at the helm for three more years he will steer the world to even greater disasters than those he has already wrought and that the US Congress should act now to rescue the world from this peril.

When I first decided to write about this subject, I thought I would have to do some considerable digging in order to identify the legal bases upon which Congress could initiate impeachment proceedings. Soon, however, I found that I was not alone in my thinking for I came across a website dedicated precisely to this cause: www.votetoimpeach.org. Here I found a bill of indictment drafted by former US Attorney-General Ramsey Clarke listing 18 charges ranging from lying to the American people to crimes against humanity.

While this document furnishes the legal foundations for impeaching Bush, work still needs to be done in order to demonstrate why proceedings against him should be set into motion as soon as possible. Specifically, we must conduct a deeper probe into this president's background in order to identify those psychological factors that combine to make him one of the greatest threats to international peace and security.

Fortunately, some of Bush's biographers have already done much of the legwork. Stephen Mansfield's The Faith of George W Bush, for example, cannot be said to be particularly hostile to its subject. Nevertheless, the reader is left with the image of a spoiled young man from a well-to-do family who frittered away his youth in assorted idle pursuits, confident that his powerful father would keep a lookout for him. He was clearly a rather dim and untalented schoolboy who had such an unexceptional high school record that he failed to get into the Texas law school for which he was supposedly destined. One therefore suspects that it was only by virtue of family connections that he was admitted to Harvard Business School, from which he did ultimately graduate -- hardly with flying colours -- and that whatever devotion he gave to his studies there was sustained by his need to meet the expectations of his class and his desire to make his mark in the money-making world of Texas oil. Even here, where again he drew on family connections to close deals, his performance was unremarkable and the oil company he founded remained one of the least profitable of Texas oil firms. More importantly, throughout this period, he was a volatile and temperamental youth, excessively fond of drink and the playboy lifestyle. And so he more or less remained, even after marrying Laura in 1977, until the turning point in his life came in 1984.

In that year, George W Bush happened to attend a lecture by the Christian evangelist Arthur Blessitt. Bush recalls that although he had no clear idea at the time about the depth of his faith, he somehow felt moved to meet with that preacher face to face. That meeting turned his life around. Suddenly he was gripped with the desire to repent and "to be born again". He gave up alcohol, started going to church regularly and dropped his old good-for-nothing friends for true believers in the fundamentalist Christian creed. While many people undergo such momentous life changes, Bush's had far reaching consequences given that a group of neo-con radicals latched onto him and began to mould him to serve their power-hungry designs which entailed capitalising on the growing tide of American Christian fundamentalism.

Bush was ideal for their purposes. Of limited skills and intelligence he was pliable material and his father was US vice-president at a time when the conservative right was scoring some of its greatest inroads in the American political scene. Bush thus was adopted as the knight in shining armour for the authors of the "New American Century". This group of radicals, whose Christian fundamentalism made them arch supporters of the Zionist project, did not put much faith in Bush senior. He was too traditionally conservative for the tastes of these zealots, for although a deeply devout Christian, he nevertheless believed that religion belonged firmly in the personal domain and, thus, strongly subscribed to the principle of separation of church and state. In all events, the elder Bush was too intelligent and too seasoned a politician to lend himself to their plans.

The more gullible Bush junior, on the other hand, was easy prey to a certain type of religious cant. In his autobiography, he writes that he was convinced that he had been divinely chosen for a mission on earth and that this revelation had inspired his decision to enter politics. When his father lost to Clinton in the 1992 presidential elections, he, at the prompting of his adviser Karl Rove, decided to run for governor of Texas. His victory in these elections confirmed his conviction in his divine calling. He further relates how his decision to run for president in 2000 came to him as an epiphany during a sermon in a church in Texas. There was the preacher talking about how Moses first balked at accepting God's call upon him to lead his people at a time when they desperately needed his moral vision and courage while Bush was overcome by the feeling that these words were being directed to him personally. Suddenly his mother turned to him and said, "the priest is calling you George." Minutes later, George "Dubya" told the preacher, "I heard the call! I think God wants me to run for president."

If he had any residual doubts about his divine calling, his victory in 2000 put an end to them. It was an easy step from there to convince him that the time for his calling had come with the attacks of 11 September, which the neo-cons quickly exploited to launch their drive to impose global hegemony by force of arms. Now, after several years of seeing the "New American Century" being put into effect, it is more than apparent that Bush is no more than a façade -- and a flimsy one at that -- for a handful of very cunning and very dangerous right-wing fanatics. There is no question in my mind that if this administration/junta stays in power for the next three years it will plunge the world into catastrophes of cataclysmic proportions.

Who would ever have believed that a US president could so much as contemplate, even if he couched the thought as a joke, bombing a television station located in one of America's allies because he felt that that station was opposed to American policy? Would anyone have ever thought it remotely conceivable that security agencies in the US -- supposedly the bastion of individual, religious and political freedoms -- would raid Muslim houses of worship on the off-chance that they might find weapons of mass destruction? Regretfully, the impossible has become possible in the age of George W Bush, which is why he is more dangerous than Bin Laden, who is playing the same game, and why legal action should be taken now to remove him from power, before it is too late.

* The writer is professor of political science at Cairo University.