Celebrated author and lawyer, Vincent Bugliosi, is making the case that George W. Bush should be tried for murder. His latest book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” makes the case that there is overwhelming evidence that our president led us into an unnecessary war under false pretenses, and should be held accountable for the deaths of 4,000 American soldiers.
That number doesn’t include the permanently maimed and disabled soldiers or the countless number of dead Iraqi civilians. He could only be charged for the Iraqi deaths in an international court, and that’s an argument not worth making. Charging him with murder will never happen either, but it’s an argument worth making for the fact that it highlights presidential accountability when it comes to war. Pundits and politicians keep making blithe statements about Bush falsely leading us into war and cooking intelligence, and they leave it at that. If he and his administration did that, and they most likely did, then why isn’t impeachment and possibly even prosecution on the table?
The reason that it’s not on the table is the fear of the ripple. First off, the Democrats fear the repercussions of making that case, even in the situation of impeachment. They fear media and public backlash for an already fading presidency. Second, they fear the what it might do to our democratic system.
That being said and all that being very possible, we must question the strength of democracy if you are unable to hold your leaders accountable for their actions. I’m not going to cite a laundry list of possible offenses that Bush should be held accountable for, mainly because I don’t have enough space. But if Bush were judged solely by the war in Iraq he could, at the very least, be found criminally negligent. If you start with ignoring CIA intelligence to push intelligence you know to be false, then go to war with zero strategy beyond the initial invasion, you start building a case for complete leadership incompetence. Then you throw in hired mercenaries, massive military industrialization backed by cronyism and backroom deals and massive, wasteful spending, and that’s just the undeniable offenses in Iraq. If you can’t hold a leader responsible for those crimes, then you are dampening the strength of democracy.
Ben Franklin was one of the major proponents of the existence of a presidential impeachment. His reasoning was that it would be in a president’s best interest to be capable of being impeached. If you want to contemplate a country without the power of impeachment or capability of prosecution, then consider how Benito Mussolini left office. A man much smarter than me once said that Bush is very fortunate to be in a country that has a controlled revolution every four years for that very reason.
It understandable to worry about the repercussions of prosecuting a president, but we must also consider how much damage is being done by just standing by and taking the consequences on the cuff while awaiting his nightmare presidency to pass.
