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ConservativesForImpeachment.com

THE 19 REASONS WHY CONSERVATIVES MUST

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH
AND RICHARD B. CHENEY

AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE,
WHILE WE STILL HAVE A NATION TO conserve

We conservative hawks – we Conservatives for Impeachment – believe
the nation will not survive another four years of Bush/Cheney
"leadership".

For one thing, Mr. Bush has not been strong on defense, as many of his
followers believe. Since he finished tearing down Saddam's regime, Mr.
Bush has been pathetically weak on defense. Indeed, he has
neglected all the great threats to America's survival.

Below you will find a long list of the threats he has ignored, added to
another list of his various failures, misjudgments and examples of
incompetence -- all of them judged by conservative standards.

This brand-new website is under construction, so each item on this list
will be slowly expanding over the next week or ten days. However, the
reader should remember that this list consists of mere one-paragraph
summaries of reasons for impeachment (or "abstracts" of reasons for
impeachment), not the full charges themselves. Full clarity is attained
in one paragraph very rarely, and only with the greatest of difficulty.

Therefore, over the next six weeks several condensations/abstracts will
be linked to full-length explanatory articles, which will be published
here, on this website, as they become ready. (The first ones, based on
Reasons for Impeachment 11 and 17, are already available.
Nonetheless, you will understand them much, much better if you first
read this page -- all the way to the bottom.)

Here is the list of condensed reasons for impeachment -- judged by
conservative standards -- beginning with those that relate to the war in
Iraq:

1) Among his many mistakes related to the Iraq war, each one of which
brings Mr. Bush’s competence into question, was his total misjudgment
of Turkey on the eve of invasion. One of the most pathetic spectacles
in American history was our ships – crammed full of troops and supplies
– bobbing uselessly in the waves off the Turkish coast, not allowed by
the Turkish government to pass through the country to open a
northern front against Iraq. How could Mr. Bush not have known that
at least 90 percent of the Turkish people opposed the use of their
country for the invasion of Iraq? How could he not have understood
that, in any democracy like Turkey, politicians must oppose anything
that 90 percent of the people oppose? Surely DIA, CIA and the State
Department (which of course has an embassy and consulates in
Turkey) must have informed the president of the country’s mood. In
the absence of sustained media interest in this subject, however, we
must rely on educated guesses for explanation of the president’s
misjudgment. We believe that -- as usual -- the president suffered
from an excess of cocky arrogance and unwarranted optimism, and
that he brushed aside all intelligence reports. He was probably certain
he could persuade Turkey to bend to our will, given enough time and
pressure, given enough carrots and sticks. He was, of course, totally
mistaken. The Turkish rejection was a national humiliation for
America, and an ominous start to the war in Iraq.

2) Mr. Bush totally underestimated Iraq's fighters and their willingness
to fight to the death.   (This underestimation was probably the main
reason why Mr. Bush was so eager to go to war in the first place.) This
is the sole accusation that requires no lengthy article as proof. One
only has to study his speech given onboard the Abraham Lincoln on
May 1, 2003 and, in retrospect, its hopelessly foolish optimism. "In the
Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed," he said
on May 1. (Is that what we did? Prevailed? I don't think so. More
than a year later, we still haven't done that.) "And now our coalition is
engaged in securing and reconstructing that country," Mr. Bush
continued. (Is that what we've been doing for the past 15 months --
"securing" Iraq? If so, it's been an unusually long and intense type of
securing, wouldn't you say?) What should we call the president's
underestimation of the enemy, and the American lives lost as a result?
A misjudgment? Or total incompetence, apparently based on
ignorance, cocky arrogance and wishful thinking?

3) Mr. Bush believed that ordinary, peaceful Iraqis would welcome us
as liberators.   He honestly believed that, once Saddam and his top
brass had been removed, ordinary Iraqis would welcome us as
liberators, and our two nations would become friends and perhaps
allies. Rarely has reality torn down unrealistic expectations so quickly.
Our thanks were limited to one day in April, 2003, when Iraqis
marched through Baghdad with signs saying, in effect, “Thank you,
America. Now Goodbye!” Even the French did not dismiss us so
quickly after World War II. Today, the vast majority of Iraqis detest us,
and those who want us to stay don’t do so out of gratitude, love or
admiration, but out of a desire for us to kill all the terrorists, to rebuild
their nation, to spend as many dollars as possible in Iraq – and then to
get the hell out.

4) But neither items 2 nor 3 convinced Mr. Bush that he had been
totally mistaken about Iraq. (Or, more likely, neither one made him
willing to admit he'd been totally mistaken.) Previously, he had made a
decision to rebuild Iraq, and nothing would deter him from that goal,
not even the reality that Iraqis hated us -- even after we had liberated
them from Saddam. As a result, no war in history has ever been fought
under more contradictory -- some would say "schizophrenic" --
conditions. For instance, never before has an army been forced to
wage war against a nation that it was simultaneously rebuilding. Or, in
reverse order, never has a country had to rebuild a nation at the same
time it was waging war against that nation. We have been spending
tens of billions of dollars to build up Iraq . . . at the same time that we
have been spending tens of billions of dollars to tear it down. Does
any of this make any sense? Obviously not. The problem is that
rebuilding is a peacetime activity intended for friendly nations. If we
go to, say, Ecuador, to rebuild a bridge, spending a few million dollars
to accomplish the task, no one will be shooting at us. Why would they
want to? After all, we are rebuilding, and thereby strengthening, their
country. But Iraq is not a friendly nation, and is therefore unsuitable
for rebuilding. In this war we have been killing tens of thousand of
Iraqis and tearing down half their country -- just so we can continue to
rebuild Iraq for them. Is this merely illogical, or is it literally insane?
This is not to say you cannot rebuild a hostile nation. We helped
rebuild Nazi Germany after World War II. But before you rebuild a
hostile nation, you must first utterly crush that nation, and break that
nation’s will to resist. Only then can you begin to rebuild it. To wage
war against a country and simultaneously rebuild it, as in Mr. Bush's
war, is historically unprecedented -- and for good reason; it makes no
sense at all.

5) As conservatives, we believe that G. W. Bush did a good job of
tearing down Saddam’s regime, and trying to hunt down his weapons
of mass destruction. We congratulate him for these two
accomplishments. The whole world is safer because of them (even
though the world obviously doesn't know it). But having accomplished
these goals, Mr. Bush plans to throw away all their benefits by
rebuilding this hostile state, and giving it back its strength. This is
foolish in the extreme. Since Iraqis detest us, they will inevitably use
the strength we have given them against us -- sooner or later. The day
the last Western soldier leaves, it will not be surprising if the Iraqi
government immediately starts negotiations with French and German
companies to build factories that manufacture chemical and biological
weapons. Isn't this where we came in? Twelve years from now, it is very
possible that we will be waging war against Iraq again, perhaps with
President Jeb Bush leading yet another futile but obligatory Bush
Family Expedition to Iraq. In other words, what does it take for
someone with the last name of "Bush" to finally finish off this endlessly
hostile and troublesome nation, once and for all? Or must we always
return to wage yet another half-hearted and inconclusive war against
Iraq? Is there anyone in the Bush family who knows what war is, and
how to win it? For a second time, Iraq has survived a war with the
world's only superpower -- this time with the superpower's own help.
We have let them off the hook again. In the next war with Iraq, who
knows what weapons Iraq may possess and use against us? For that
matter, who knows which one of us will prevail?

6) Closely related to item 5 is this theoretical reality, straight out of
Clausewitz: Warfare and compassion do not mix well together (even if
the compassion is in the form of rebuilding the enemy). After all,
warfare and compassion are polar opposites. They tend to nullify each
other; they tend to cancel each other out. Therefore, because of our
compassion we have not been able to use our great advantage in Iraq
-- distance, both vertical and horizontal. If we had shelled enemy
towns from five miles out, or bombed them from 35,000 feet, we would
have almost no casualties today. But the compassionate nature of the
war made this impossible. After all, if we had attacked Iraqis from a
distance, we might have killed many "good Iraqis," whom Mr. Bush has
assured us make up the vast majority of the Iraqi people. Therefore
our compassion mandates that we get up close to be sure that an Iraqi
is a "bad Iraqi" before we kill him. (He is a bad Iraqi if he tries to shoot
us.) But at close range, the bad Iraqi also has a good chance of killing
us. Thus in general, our compassion holds back the fist of warfare; it
makes it impossible for us to use our full force in war. But the opposite
is also true. Warfare guarantees that the enemy will not appreciate
our compassion. Although we have rebuilt thousands of Iraqi schools,
etc., you would be hard pressed to find some Iraqi who thinks
Americans are compassionate. (After all, on any given day we may have
killed 100 Iraqis, and destroyed 20 buildings.) This conflict between
warfare and compassion must have come as no mystery to our military.
You only have to read as far as page two of Clausewitz' On War to learn
that of all the mistakes in warfare the very worst come from a spirit of
compassion (or kindness or benevolence, depending on the
translation). Thus, to start a military oxymoron -- a compassionate war
-- Mr. Bush's political needs (the desire to placate American liberals,
our allies or the U.N.) may have overruled all military wisdom.

7) From the very beginning, Mr. Bush gave himself and America's
military an idealistic but totally impossible task -- to turn Iraq into a
stable democracy. This has always been the central purpose of Mr.
Bush's humanitarian rebuilding (to the extent that this great purpose
can be determined). Unfortunately, one of the two great requirements
for a stable democracy is a stable citizenry, and Iraqis are arguably the
least stable people on earth. The second requirement is a tolerant
citizenry and, again, you would find a tolerant Iraqi only with the
greatest difficulty. (Can you imagine Iraq's Sunni Arabs being tolerant
of its Shiite Arabs, or vice versa? Can you conceive of any Iraqi Arab
being tolerant of an Iraqi Kurd, or vice versa?) It would take decades
of total media control -- with endless pro-stability and pro-tolerance
propaganda -- to change Iraqis into a people capable of a stable
democracy. After all, it took centuries for Europe and its offspring
nations to develop today's democracies. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush is
certain the task can be accomplished in Iraq in just three or four years'
time. If this were not sufficiently questionable, Iraqis and other Arabs
don't even want a democratic form of government, and it is only Mr.
Bush's small-town naiveté and cultural arrogance that makes him
believe they do. (Has any American seen one -- just one -- large-scale
demonstration in favor of democracy in Iraq, or anywhere else in the
Arab world since 9/11? We have not.)

8) Nonetheless, it is possible (but highly unlikely) that after a decade
or two, with a trillion American dollars spent and tens of thousands of
American soldiers lost, we may indeed create a stable democracy in
Iraq. But would that really be such a good thing? One thing is certain:
we should not expect gratitude. Because Iraqis detest us, an Iraqi
democracy would probably be the most anti-American democracy on
the planet. And being a democracy, the government would have to
turn the people's intensely anti-American feelings into anti-American
policies. (Is democracy really a desired goal in all circumstances? In
the Muslim world, our two most reliable allies -- Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait -- are authoritarian regimes.) So let us pretend Mr. Bush
achieves his goal of an Iraqi democracy. In the future, he could look
back at his great triumph: he would have created an anti-American
democracy, and given it the strength -- by our rebuilding -- to act upon
its anti-Americanism. Historians of the future would look back on our
rebuilding of Iraq, and our creation of an Iraqi democracy, with
confusion. To them it would seem that we had gone to immense
expense and endured endless misery -- just to strengthen our greatest
enemy.   (This item is also closely related to item 5.)

9) We have heard many loyal and sincere American military men
speaking on television in favor of Mr. Bush's "mission." One general
recently said on television that if America can just turn Iraq into a
stable democracy, the day of dictatorships in the Middle East will be
numbered. Although beautifully idealistic, we respectfully disagree
with this prediction. In a regional struggle between one democracy
and a multitude of surrounding dictatorships, you would do well to bet
on the dictatorships. After all, dictatorships -- which use violence and
the fear of violence to maintain their power on an everyday basis -- are
inherently more violent than democracies, which are peaceful states
ruled by laws. In the current scenario, if the existence of an Iraqi
democracy genuinely threatened the existence of the dictatorships,
the latter would inevitably send out endless legions of assassins to
wipe out the democracy's elected leaders, and thereby wipe out the
democracy itself. There is nothing in the nature of a democracy that
would allow it to create an equally violent defensive counter-response
-- in time to protect itself and survive. Tragically, therefore, democracy
in Iraq will last as long as tens of thousands of Western soldiers remain
there to protect the democracy, and not one month longer.

10) Several times Mr. Bush has struck out with what he apparently
believes is a great insult to Senator Kerry -- that if elected Mr. Kerry
would not carry out "the mission" in Iraq. But unintentionally he may
have given Kerry the ultimate compliment. If readers have studied this
web page, they understand just how mysterious, contradictory and
illogical this mission is -- a Mission Impossible into which Mr. Bush has
dragged the magnificent American military. Indeed, precisely what is
the mission? Exactly why are we rebuilding Iraq? It would be helpful
to us and to the nation if Mr. Bush would define the mission and its
purpose in unambiguous terms (although, frankly, we doubt the
mission would survive a lack of ambiguity). With a precise definition we
could measure just how far we have come, or not come, in
accomplishing the mission. We would also be able to determine if the
rebuilding of Iraq still made sense, or if it was time to move on to other
threatening states.

This concludes the items dealing with Iraq. Let us now turn to the real
threats to the nation that Mr. Bush, seemingly obsessed with Iraq, has
ignored:

11) Mr. Bush isn't concerned in the slightest that two Third World
nations (India and Pakistan) already have nuclear weapons and are
increasing the range of their ballistic missiles every few months. But it
we don’t stop them, they will shortly be able to destroy American cities,
whenever they might wish to, for whatever bizarre reasons that might
make sense to them at the time. India's missiles can already travel
more than 2,000 miles, while the range of Pakistan's exceeds 1,000
miles. Are we just going to wait for them to achieve New
York/Washington range, when it will be too late to do anything about
it? If we wait, we will be putting our fate into the hands of two Third
World nations, both of them with tens of millions of religious fanatics,
one of them Islamic. Does this sound like a good idea? No, of course
not. That would be suicidal for America. But G. W. Bush sees no
danger here. On the contrary, he has given his blessing to both
nations’ nuclear programs.   He apparently believes that Pakistan's
current pro-American government will last forever, though no Pakistani
government endures for long. And what will the Pakistani government
be like that replaces Mr. Musharraf? It will not be pro-American.
Ninety-seven percent of Pakistanis are Muslims, and the vast majority
of them detest us. Worse yet, tens of millions of Pakistanis are
fundamentalists, who will have no fear of death if they die fighting
infidels, since they believe they will automatically go to heaven in such
a fight. Therefore, nuclear deterrence will be meaningless in a conflict
with Pakistan, since nuclear deterrence is based upon the fear of
death, and is nonexistent without it. As for India, it is certainly less of
a threat, but we will never disarm Pakistan without simultaneously
disarming India (Pakistan quite accurately believes that India is a
threat, and vice versa). But let us move to the bottom line: we already
have two nations (Russia and China) that, taken together, are pointing
thousands of nuclear warheads at us right now. Isn't this enough of a
threat, or do we really need to put our survival into the hands of two
more nations? (Click here for a full-length explanatory article about
Pakistan.)

12) One “rogue state” (North Korea) possesses both nuclear weapons
and ballistic missiles, and some of these missiles may have the range to
hit America’s West Coast cities. North Korea is also endlessly
confrontational, and is considered a threat by the entire world.
Perhaps that is because the nation is led by a madman. So is
President Bush alarmed by an apparent lunatic with nuclear
weapons? Is he actively confronting this nation every day, and
pressuring it to disarm immediately (or at least allow immediate
inspections?) No, Mr. Bush is doing little or nothing about North
Korea, aside from holding occasional fruitless talks. North Korea is not
one of his top two priorities. What are his priorities? First in line, of
course, comes his reelection, the retention of his political power. Next
comes the rebuilding of Iraq.

13) Other rogue states (Syria, the Sudan and Iran, for example) may be
developing (or may already have developed) nuclear weapons or other
WMDs. Is Mr. Bush putting constant pressure on the U.N. to force
those rogue states to allow ongoing nuclear inspections, preferably
with no notification necessary? Or, if those nations refuse to allow
inspections, and if the U.N. refuses to order the inspections, is Mr.
Bush ready to pay these nations Iraq-style visits so we can inspect
them ourselves? No, President Bush is in no hurry to deal with Iran,
Syria and the Sudan, and the nuclear weapons they may have. Mr.
Bush plans to tie down our military and our budget for years in
rebuilding all-important Iraq and its all-important embryonic
democracy.

14) Mr. Bush has put real threats 11, 12 and 13 on the back burner so
he can concentrate the nation’s resources on rebuilding Iraq. From
what we have seen above, however, such a choice seems wildly illogical,
to say the very least. But it is possible that this misallocation of
resources is due to cold political calculation, and not to an obsession
with Iraq. (For example, for political reasons Mr. Bush may feel he must
finish what he started in Iraq or he will appear to be weak, indecisive,
or a failure, etc.) If political expediency is the reason why we have
endured in the nonsensical rebuilding of Iraq while ignoring real
threats to our survival, it seems much more politically dangerous for
Mr. Bush. It appears to us an act of treason to knowingly ignore dire
threats to the nation for the furtherance of one's own political goals.

15) Every year, hundreds of thousands of Mexican illegal immigrants
are streaming across our southern border into America’s Southwest,
which used to be a part of Mexico. Most Mexicans still see this area as
an integral part of their country that was stolen from them when their
nation was young and weak. They want our Southwest to be Mexican
territory again, and illegal immigration is the way they will get it back.
From an American point of view, therefore, allowing this illegal
immigration from Mexico is suicidal, for sooner rather than later it will
lead to a new Civil War, a struggle for the American Southwest that we
may or may not win. So what is George Bush doing to stop illegal
immigration across our southern border? Little or nothing, because
his first priority is his own political self-interest; he wants to be sure to
win the Hispanic vote in 2004, and standing up to illegal immigration
would alienate most Hispanics. To conservatives like us, this inaction
definitely reaches the level of treason; again, in a different way, he is
ignoring a great threat to the nation to reach his own political
goals.

16) Although Mr. Bush is not trying to bankrupt the nation with large
budget deficits (nor to destroy the dollar’s value in the process), he
has nonetheless taken giant steps toward achieving both goals. The
budget deficit for this fiscal year is estimated at $445 billion, an
American record (in dollar terms) that exceeds last year's record-high
deficit of $374B. And despite Mr. Bush's rhetoric he may match or
exceed these records in coming years -- if he is reelected. One
consequence of these massive budget deficits is that the world loses
confidence in our ability to manage our affairs. Therefore, the deficits
drive down the value of the dollar. It has already fallen so much that a
Euro is worth about $1.25 – when in recent memory it was worth as
little as $.89. Republican politicos will say (off the record) that the
cheapening of the dollar is a good thing, since it makes our
manufactured goods cheaper around the world: American
manufacturers can sell their products and services more easily abroad
if they are cheaper. But this logic has not worked: our trade deficit
recently rose to a record of $55.8 billion. Besides, carried to its logical
conclusion, the cheaper dollar policy will turn us into a Third World
nation. If we must continue to cheapen our dollar to compete
internationally, in a decade our workers may be receiving Pacific Rim
wages. But this much is certain: if we are ever again to balance the
budget, it will not happen while G. W. Bush is president. The bottom
line? Creating massive budget (and trade) deficits and thereby
destroying the value of the dollar are not the acts of a conservative.

17) To please the corporations that have brought him to power with
their campaign contributions, George Bush has done nothing to
prevent the destruction of America's entire manufacturing base.
Corporations continue to move their factories to the Pacific Rim,
especially to China, and this is just fine with Mr. Bush (although our
trade deficit just reached a new record in June, 2004). There is a
certain cosmic humor here. Although he is supposed to be a great
backer of capitalism, Mr. Bush has no problem with the world's leading
capitalist country putting more and more of its factories inside the
walls of the world's leading Communist country, a dictatorship every bit
as brutal as the Soviet Union at the peak of its power. Has it ever
occurred to Mr. Bush that China can nationalize all our factories at any
time it wishes, and that we could do nothing about it? What better
way could Communist China find to seize the means of production of
the greatest capitalist power than by nationalizing them? In this way,
China would become the world's economic superpower (if it isn't
already). Is Mr. Bush even aware of Lenin's joke about the greed of the
last capitalist -- and the rope used to hang him? (Click here for a
somewhat humorous view of Mr. Bush's sellout to China.)

18) Mr. Bush has destroyed most of our traditional military alliances
and old friendships with foreign states. Never have we been so alone.
Never has America been less popular abroad, and never has a
president been so despised everywhere in the world -- except among
his American admirers. Certainly Mr. Bush's policies, including the Iraq
war, have contributed to this destruction, but the president's manner -
his abrupt way of ordering around esteemed friends and allies to do
his bidding -- has contributed just as much. This loss is colossally
important because any country's military strength is the sum of its own
military strength added to the military strength of those countries who
can be relied on to fight at its side. It is by no means certain that even
the ever-loyal U.K. and Australia will be fighting at our sides in the
future.

19) Thanks to the president, we are wide open to terrorist attacks.
Obvious holes in our defenses have not yet been plugged. As one
example, it would be almost as easy for terrorists to carry out a jetliner-
as-missile attack on New York and Washington today as it was on 9/11.
If this is true (if we cannot even stop attacks almost identical to those
of September 11), President Bush and Vice President Cheney should
surely be impeached for incompetence.