One of the few presidential candidates that opposed the war, would be a good guy to have on the ticket. Also happens to be one of the few politicians that I think are trustworthy:
TALLAHASSEE - Sen. Bob Graham was left on a lonely limb last summer when he said, in response to a reporter's prompt, that George Bush's misadventure in Iraq met the standard of an impeachable offense. Even some Democrats hastened to disagree. As it turns out, Graham was right. It's his timing that was off.
As Graham acknowledged, however, impeachment is not a realistic prospect in a Congress controlled by intense loyalists of the president's party. Even so, historians may wonder why one president was impeached for lying about sex but his successor was not even investigated for a scandal as immense as Iraq.
The nation has never been led so badly, except, perhaps, by James Buchanan, who at the brink of civil war did not lead at all.
It is not simply that lives are being wasted because of pretexts that have turned out to be untrue, or that the situation is worsening with no relief in sight. There is also the spectacle, as Bob Kerrey framed it in a question to Condoleezza Rice the other day, of "a largely Christian army in a Muslim nation." This is a colossal disaster, as history could have warned anyone who had cared to pay attention. The Crusades may be only a passing chapter in Western history, but the Middle East remembers them as a fountain of evils that persist to this day.
The result, as Graham foresaw when he voted against the war, has been to multiply, diversify, and in their eyes justify the Islamic terrorists who were at war against us long before 9/11. We are not safer today because of Saddam Hussein's overthrow and capture. The rest of the world, not to mention Iraq itself, has become more dangerous. Let anyone who doesn't think so go to Madrid.
The adversary, as Richard Clarke explains concisely in Against All Enemies, "does not just seek terror for its own sake." The goal, rather, "is the creation of a network of governments, imposing on their citizens a minority interpretation of Islam. Some in the movement call for the scope of their campaign to be global domination. The "Caliphate' they seek to create would be a severe and repressive fourteenth-century literalist theocracy. They pursue its creation with gruesome violence and fear."
All we have done is to add fuel to their fire. One possibility is that Iraq, freed of its secular dictator, will end up like Afghanistan under the Taliban. Are we prepared to stay indefinitely in Iraq to prevent that?
There are times when a Western presence has been and would be justifiable: The Iraqi aggression before the first Gulf War. The Taliban harboring al-Qaida in Afghanistan. It might have been justifiable in Iraq also upon concrete proof either that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction or that further inspections would be ineffective.
Did Bush know there weren't any weapons? Was that why he wrote off further inspections - because he feared they would unmake the case for war?
If the administration lied to justify the invasion, it would unquestionably be impeachable. We are not likely ever to know the truth about that, because only a fully independent investigation armed with subpoena power could answer the question. It is not one of the subjects in the portfolio of the 9/11 commission.
At best, however, the administration's record on Iraq is one of gross incompetence. That has never been the nexus of an impeachment proceeding, though there is nothing in the United States' owners' manual - the Federalist Papers - to the effect that it could not be. The framers deliberately left it vague.
The Federalist is clear, however, on another remedy. "That magistrate," Hamilton wrote in comparing the American presidency to the British monarch, "is to be elected for four years; and he is to be re-eligible as often as the people of the United States shall think him worthy of their confidence."
The Democrats have a conspicuous handicap. Their nominee was, if not an accomplice to Bush, at least an enabler. He voted in favor of a war that was as dubious, if not more so, than the one in which he was both a hero and a protester; a war that, unlike Vietnam, is entirely of our own making; a war that may last as long or longer; a war where, this time, there are dominoes, but we're the ones pushing them over.
If Bush has forfeited the nation's confidence, Kerry has yet to earn it. A fact in his defense is that members of Congress must trust the president to a certain extent, because he has access to more information than they do. But Graham, as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, had access to nearly as much. When Graham voted against the war, why didn't Kerry take his cue from that?
Presumably Kerry knows better now. One way to prove that to the voters would be to announce very soon that Graham would be at his right hand in Washington, and not necessarily as vice president. Director of central intelligence would be a nice fit also. So would secretary of homeland security. Who better than a former governor to run a huge agency whose shortcomings he already understands?
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