Baraka_Guru

But do they do this sort of thing in the U.S.? Get into extensive inquiries to investigate potential wrongdoings conducted by the executive?

The only things that come to mind are Watergate and Lewinskygate.

However, I admit I don't follow American politics that closely. Would it be a rare thing to have an inquiry into the actions of the Bush administration? Would it be unprecedented? Is this why there is so much reluctance? Would this undermine the power of the presidency in general?

It it because America is still "at war"?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

there haven't been a whole lot of examples like that of the bush administration.

watergate was a shitty, stupid obviously criminal side-action. the other one was a partisan witch-hunt over what i personally regard as a non-issue. either way, what they have in common is that each involves an isolated or isolatable action and that each is to the side of the actual doings of the the president. so neither is about a philosophy of executive power. both are just stupid.

the american system seems set up to address stupid side things, but doesn't seem capable of addressing either clear violations of law national and international that flow from policy positions (guantanomo) and even less violations that are clearly problematic but which may not involve an existing law---for example there may not be an explicit law that says "thou shalt not make up the grounds for a war"

there's obviously a political problem---a shitload of them---that accompany making up the grounds for war when it becomes obvious that those grounds are made up---but in the case of the bush people, alot of those problems seemed to follow from the "free" press collectively waking up and realizing that they'd not only been sold a pile of shit by the administration but worse that they'd actively-to-enthusiastically repeated that pile of shit to the point of endangering their own political credibility (political here in a broad sense)...so you could see the consequences of the bush people's actions having been so far limited to their being thrown under the bus by regions of the nation press for reasons that had everything to do with the interests of the national press and nothing at all to do with redress for doing things like

making up the grounds for a war and
systematically misleading the american public
and
that sort of thing

and it may be that the outcome of an investigation would be a new set of hedges placed around executive power at the statutory level--but the bush people couldn't themselves be prosecuted under law that their actions may have more or less caused to be written.

so it's a problem. it's particularly an issue for a centrist like obama who seems to have thought that prosecution would alienate the right when his tactical inclinations were to work with/co-opt the right. but that seems to have only provided the right space to drift further into dissociative ultra-right/neo-fascist spaces, at least at the populist level, the level that relies on affinities with fox news to get an inordinate amount of press coverage.

at the same time, i think the actions of the bush people require some kind of response...some kind of investigation, some kind of action even if it would be complicated to pull off to what i would regard as a successful conclusion. system legitimacy requires it. but i doubt it'll happen. and the system will bear the consequences of the erosion that this will engender in its legitimacy.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

I think this is the crux of the problem here. If the Bush administration was able to do what it did and suffer no consequences (essentially conducting several actions that break international law and getting off scot-free), what does this enable for future presidencies?

If the actions of Bush in this respect go unchecked, unexamined, unpunished, his term will be regarded as an example of some of the extremes an administration can go to without worrying much about the consequences personally and politically. It will be Bush's legacy.

And then there are the things the Bush administration did that we may never know about.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

well, if the neocon's plan for iraq had worked out, had it not been so astonishingly stupid, had it really been the case that the u.s. would tweeze into the place, topple saddam hussein and then be greeted by an adoring populace who would then maybe sit around a great big campfire with the Great Conservative Liberator and agree "hey kidz let's put on a country" and then by gum there'd be a country underway and the americans could just put their arms on their collective hips and watch all this fine free activity happen "now there you go that's what we're in the liberation business for..." then questions of legitimacy never would have come up because the idea was never really to liberate iraq but rather to rewind the first gulf war and tell this whole multi-lateral based united nations-liking insufficiently nationalist for neo-conservative political purposes kind of new world order thing to Scatter because there's a New Sheriff in town and his name is hegemon and hegemon doesn't answer to anyone because, well, he's Hegemon dammit and he's got the guns and if you fuck with him he'll liberate you too....


except of course that things didn't work out.

but if they had would there be any of these problems?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

Well, whether things worked out or not is a matter of opinion, and one that perhaps is yet to be determined. And now we come back to the idea of American neocolonialism in Iraq.

US Companies Join Race on Iraqi Oil Bonanza

So what we have here is a situation---a $10 billion situation---where the key beneficiaries happen to be Houston-based oil companies. It's not that non-American companies don't have rights to these contracts, and it's not that Iraq doesn't have a say in what goes on in its own country. However, given the circumstances---you know, war, destabilization, a lack of key infrastructure, continued American military operations/occupation/decision making, etc.---it would be a bit of a stretch to say that Iraq has much choice at all. In the words of Thomas Friedman, Iraq may very well need to don the "golden straightjacket."

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and look who stands to gain the most. But surely they have no connections to anyone in the Bush administration....

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

well in terms of the famous "wolfowitz plan" which was framed by the project for a new american century's repeated requests for a new war in iraq to erase the memory of the first one, there's no ambiguity about how things in iraq have played out: unmitigated fiasco. the stage of halliburton/kbr infrastructure "development" was to have happened much earlier and more smoothly--i sometimes think the neocons imagine neocolonialism as indistinguishable from "free enterprise" to the extent that it is just the natural lot of some people's to be dominated.

anyway, yeah so the bellying up to the trough begins as the transition from colonial to neo-colonial domination gets underway (why bother with military domination when you can simply control economies? neocolonialism is more cost-effective.)

an indication of just how badly off the rails some aspects of the gameplan have gone is the static that halliburton/kbr are getting for the gaffe jobs they'd done on the provisional iraqi regimes. now they want to be permanent. of course the problem is oversight at the iraqi end.

o and here are some new numbers, for your amusement:

Iraq War Facts, Statistics at March 29, 2010 - Iraq War Casualties, Spending, Iraqi Quality of Life

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite