Should President Bush be impeached, as some Democrats in Congress are now reportedly considering?
Absolutely not.
Why not? Clinton lied and he got impeached; why shouldn’t Bush?
President Clinton committed perjury in a sexual harassment trial. The entire world knew of this perjury, and the only defense he could give was nonsense about “what the meaning of the word IS is.” This was more disgraceful than anything that ever took place on the floor of the Oval Office with that White House intern.
President Bush didn’t lie. He made the decision to invade Iraq as part of his strategy in the war against terrorism. He claimed, correctly, that he had intelligence information leading him to believe there were weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence information apparently was wrong, but we may never know for sure what Iraq had or didn’t have in the way of weapons. Bush’s chief error was going after Iraq, rather than Iran. Iran, unlike Iraq, is openly dedicated to the nuclear annihilation of all things Western including, specifically, our chief ally in the Middle East, Israel, and, if possible someday, the United States itself. Iran is recognized, and has been for 25 years, as the # 1 sponsor of Muslim terrorism. At the very least, Iran should have been massively and repeatedly bombed immediately after 9/11. At the most, it should have been occupied.
Were President Bush’s errors serious ones? Of course. But he’s not guilty of perjury. He’s guilty of strategic errors. But this isn’t why some people want to impeach him. They want to impeach him partly out of partisan revenge for Clinton’s impeachment, and partly because he dared to use military force at all–especially without the consent of the U.N. In actual fact, these are reasons to support President Bush, not to oppose him. Yet it’s not what the impeachment talk is all about.
I’m the first one to criticize President Bush, and I know that his foreign policy has been bad for the country. It has been halting, inconsistent, and mostly directed at the wrong enemy. He apologizes when he shouldn’t, and he doesn’t fight harder when he should. But he’s not to be condemned for acting as the Commander in Chief. His opponents are angry that he didn’t cede power to the United Nations and to the socialistic, antiwar left in the Michael Moore/Jimmy Carter dominated Democratic Party, as President Clinton did and as President Kerry would have done. This is no crime, morally or legally. It’s actually quite the opposite.