Another socialist blog

Gerald Ford, the only unelected President of the United States, has died at the age of 93. Many have stepped forward to say a kind word about him, as we should about any man who has died. But Ford was more than a man, he was a historical figure, and kindness toward the dead should never trump an accurate account of history.

The Vietnam War ended on President Ford’s watch, over the objections of Ford, which ought to tarnish his nice-guy reputation just a bit. In 1974 Ford made a speech to Congress trying to persuade them to vote more funding for Vietnam. Congress refused, and some freshmen members of Congress got up and walked out of the speech, to their credit. Today’s Congress could follow that example.

Ford has an entirely undeserved reputation, in the mainstream media at least, as the “healer of the nation” because of the Nixon pardon. The Chicago Tribune’s comments are typical: Stanley I. Kutler claims that “the pardon spared us years of court proceedings, riding a wave of national obsession about Watergate.” Indeed, that’s what Ford said he was doing when he pardoned Nixon for all crimes he committed as President, even though no charges had yet been filed.

The obvious response is, where were the conservatives when the Bill Clinton legal proceedings were going on and on and on, all the way to impeachment? Where was the concern for “national obsession” then? (And since when does “national obsession” give anybody a Get Out of Jail Free card? By that logic, O.J. Simpson should have been pardoned before trial.) Allow me to supply the obvious answer: the interminable Clinton investigations were allowed to proceed because they were politically expedient for Republicans. And the years of court proceedings against Richard Nixon were halted—before charges could even be filed!—because it would have been disastrous for Republicans. Go ahead and call me cynical; I learned how to be a cynic from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The message of the pardon is simply that you can get away with anything if you have sufficiently powerful friends. The long history of Presidential criminality since Nixon tells me that the message was heard loud and clear.

Now that even our government admits that Iraq policy has to change, we are hearing lots of statements that we must change the policy, but avoid “defeat.” The President says he listens to all opinions, but he rejects the ones that would “lead to defeat.” The new Secretary of Defense, Roberts M. Gates, warns that “failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility and endanger Americans for decades to come.”

Sounds a lot like the consequences if they succeed. It does no good to talk about whether “America” succeeds in Iraq, or whether “we” succeed in Iraq, only about who succeeds in Iraq. There are the people who wanted the war and started it, and there are the rest of us. We don’t have the same idea of what victory would be.

We’ve known for some time what the White House thinks. George W. Bush and the ruling class he represents are after a renewed American empire, starting with a colony in the Middle East. Bush has publicly admitted what he denied for years, which is that he is after the oil reserves. The more than half a million dead in Iraq were expendable in the cause of U.S. imperialism.

For the rest of us, “success” is stopping a war of aggression before it can do more damage, and bringing the perpetrators to justice. Success is exposing the war profiteers who started two wars for private profit. Success is permanently discrediting imperialism in general and U.S. imperialism in particular, and convincing the rest of the world that the majority of Americans are willing to respect the sovereignty of other countries. David McReynolds notes:

I understand those who feel that it would be irresponsible “to turn and run”. But to think the US can “fix” things now is like thinking a rapist is the ideal person to stay and provide therapy to the victim.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces is something different: a right-wing Christian violent video game. Not something you see every day. Based on a fundamentalist interpretation of Revelation, the game pits players against the Antichrist’s team. You convert the enemy characters to Jesus, or kill them. There’s a good deal of killing.

You can choose to play for the Antichrist’s team, but that team cannot win.

The Antichrist is of course a fictional Secretary General of the U.N. His team includes fictional rock stars and anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. The game’s publishers piously insist they are not fomenting hatred against Muslims, which is about as convincing as George Bush saying his “crusade” isn’t anti-Islam either.

I was not one of those calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld didn’t get the war wrong, the entire U.S. government got foreign policy wrong. It’s not that we have a “job” to “get done” in Iraq, a job that Rumsfeld did badly. The entire enterprise was a crime from the beginning, and the entire administration should resign, not just Rumsfeld. Better than half of the Congress should go with them.

But Rumsfeld is out, and now we have Robert M. Gates nominated to succeed him. Lest you think that the Bush administration has learned its lesson, consider these highlights from the Gates bio:

• He has a history of cooking the intelligence: Intelligence cherry-picked for ideological purposes; the claims of a single, unreliable source treated as fact and stovepiped straight up to the White House; a National Intelligence Estimate riddled with dubious claims; efforts made to connect an enemy regime with international terrorism. This will no doubt remind you of 2003 and the run-up to the war against Iraq, but no, these charges come from the 1980s and come from his coworkers at the CIA. Ray McGovern served in the CIA for 27 years and was Gates’s branch chief at the CIA in the early ’70s. He comments that
  

  Bill Casey had this bizarre notion that the Soviets were going to come up through Nicaragua and Mexico into Texas. Reagan even said such things. And Bobby Gates sort of played on that kind of shibboleth. And when Casey mined the harbors, well, Gates wrote a memo that said we ought to bomb them, as well, bomb the tanks. So, you know, whether he believed that or not, this was a deliberate sort of pandering to the known proclivities of Bill Casey and, of course, the President.

• He has a history of lying to Congress about criminal conspiracies in the Executive branch. He told the Iran-Contra independent counsel that he, the deputy director of the CIA, knew nothing at all about Oliver North’s illegal contra resupply operation, the diversion to the contras of profits from covert arms sales to Iran, or the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. These claims of innocence were contradicted by other CIA officials .

George W. Bush couldn’t have nominated a better guy to shred documents for him.