The American people are not its government, but if the American people don't at some point make the strongest statement to repudiate the policies of these "Bathists" like Cheney who have shaped and implemented Bush administration torture policy, they become co-responsible. The precedents have to be undone, and the only way I can think to do it is by putting the architects of American torture policy on trial for war crimes.
Obama, I'm sure, doesn't want to go there. It will be hard for him to square it in the public imagination with his main priority to build unity and bipartisanship. [Update: He says he will if there is willful criminality.] The GOP culture is all about bitch-slapping its opposition; the Democrats have shown that they are all too willing to be slapped around. Even if a Obama decided to go after these GOP Bathists, he probably would not be supported by the Pelosi/Reid crowd and the the Clinton DLC types.
Bill Clinton showed the way when he let sleeping dogs lie when it came to following up on the crimes of the Reagan/Bush 1 administration's complicity with Iran Contra and the the release of the American hostages on Reagan's inauguration day. Now he's best buds with Bush the elder. Anybody who's half awake knows what happened during the Reagan-Bush years and is outraged, but because Clinton did not flush it out, the mentality continued to fester and to retain legitimacy, and it's that same mentality that brought us the Iraq debacle.
There were all kinds of debate even among liberals about the legitimacy of taking out a bad guy like Saddam. If we could do it in Yugoslavia, why not in Iraq? Leave aside the abstract moral questions about preemptive war, etc.-- the biggest reason the Iraq War should have been opposed was because of the mentality of the people who were its architects. We knew who they were. This was not an abstract moral question; it was a question of trusting these people and their crazy ideas about American power. Again, anybody who knows been in the least bit awake in the last thirty years knows the stupidity, the brutishness, and horror that this mentality produces. You didn't have to be a genius to predict what the outcome in Iraq was likely to be; you just had to know a little bit about history and the mentality of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney who have been around since the Nixon administration. Honestly, can anybody really be surprised?
The Cheney mentality is what must be flushed out into the open and soundly repudiated once and for all.The point is that you can't just pretend that it's normal or that it's one legitimate point of view that should be part of the debate. No. The Republicans infected with the Cheney mentality are the American Bathists, and they must be delegitimized and marginalized once and for all. You cannot move forward so long as the people infected with this illness still remain in the bureaucracy, and their mentality is legitimated by its spokesmen in Congress. As they did during the Clinton years, they will bide their time waiting for their opportunity to return to power.
I know there a many decent people who incline toward the "conservative" values of the Republican Party, but it should be clear to anyone by now that the Republican Party is not run by people who the least interest in conservative principles. The party is run by thugs. Others who consider themselves moderates in a show of idealism and independent thinking say they will vote for the candidate who they think is best no matter what his or her party affiliation. But it's not about the individual. How many individual Republicans have consistently stood up against this sick Republican mentality? Chafee in Rhode Island? Hagel from Nebraska? Who else? Others like Spector, Graham, and Warner sometimes talk sense, but they vote with the pack.
You can't stand against the machine and survive for long. It should be clear that regardless of the decency of individual Republicans, the GOP is dominated by a kind of sickness that derives from a obsession with power. It fosters a mentality that celebrates the brutish and denigrates the intelligent and prudent. There were many decent people who lived in the South during the days of Jim Crow, but they weren't running things. It's the same now with the Republican Party.
Like the mentality of the Southern segregationists, it is a mentality that infects everything it touches with brutish horror--even in small things, the things we never hear about. Check out This American Life's podcast from a couple of weeks ago entitled "The Audacity of Government," particularly Act Two (h/t Jason). It describes precisely the thing that small government conservatives are supposed to hate--an unfettered and unaccountable executive branch that is governed only by the principle that its will must prevail no matter how unfounded in common sense or common decency. It's raison d'etre is simply the exercise of power for its own sake.
How is a John Yoo, David Addington, or Dick Cheney even possible? How is it that we have a system that allows people like that into such critical positions of influence? The answer lies in that they are supported by an entire governmental culture shaped over almost thirty years since Reagan. It is a sick, sick culture, and the Democrats are almost as bad for their collaboration with it. The bureaucracy is dominated by the power mentality groupthink that these sick men represent because people like them have been dominating the bureaucracy for all but eight years since 1980. People with a shred of decency don't last in this culture. They leave, they write their books, and then everyone else goes out and mows the lawn. And when election time comes around, as it did in 2004, a majority voted to keep these criminals in office.
What is the matter with us? And now people are seriously considering voting for John McCain? Why should this man who has done everything he can to ingratiate himself to the GOP power establishment in recent years so he can finally realize his personal ambitions be taken seriously. Because he was a POW forty years ago? How is it possible to take such a man seriously? I do not see an honorable man here. I see an ambitious man. He may articulate a position or two that is calculated to show he does have a shred of decency, but as we saw during the Military Commission Act fight, he Spectored. We have no reason to believe anything he says. He's a militarist, a fatuous jingoist, and when push comes to shove just another GOP stooge despite whatever reputation he might have for being the Republican maverick.
So the other Republican stooges in Congress and the stooges in the media will all scream bloody murder if war crimes investigations are initiated during an Obama administration. They'll dismiss it as petty political retaliation. Obama won't have the stomach for it, but there is no reconciling with this sick mentality because the very nature of the sickness is to resist at all cost reconciliation and compromise. It must get its own way. The only possibility to create a genuine unity government is to weaken and marginalize anybody who has been infected with the Cheney power sickness. These Bathists must be repudiated--if war crimes trials are not the way, then some other way. But we cannot let sleeping dogs lie.