Defeat Saddam
DEFEAT SADDAM Administrations and politicians can avoid reality for only so long. Eventually, reality intrudes on artful spinning and wishful thinking. Since last January, we have been arguing that...
...And if there are certain things he may lie about, how might the Justice Department continue fully to enforce federal perjury penalties against all the rest of us...
...But since we're stuck with it, its application must be rigorously restricted to presidents whose actions are so dastardly as to "disable or potentially disable" the entire legislative or judicial branch of government...
...credibility destroyed and U.S...
...Now we are told, by Clinton's most sophisticated advocates, that it is too much to ask—even dangerous to ask—that a president not be a felon...
...Two of them, Arthur Schlesin-ger Jr...
...Oddly enough, the fact that this principle has been almost forgotten—that the nation wants to keep Bill Clinton—is one of the strongest reasons he should be impeached...
...Perjury charges against the president...
...Matthew Holden Jr...
...Now the task is actually to do what is necessary, and not to shy away from the full implications of that understanding...
...But everyone ought also to grasp that an air campaign alone will not solve the problem...
...Robert Kagan, for the Editors DISHONEST EXCUSES FOR A DISHONEST PRESIDENT When you are on the "winning" side of some soon to be resolved issue, you are naturally disinclined to invite detailed argument about the merits of your position...
...We must get on with more important public business—like, Rep...
...Pollitt based this claim on a specious account of the perjury statutes and case law, derived almost verbatim from White House Counsel's Office memoranda...
...By widespread agreement, the Monica Lewinsky scandal sets too low a bar for removal of a president...
...And because, as Sunstein put it, "it is extremely doubtful that the line could be held in practice...
...Congressional Democrats believe they have this Clinton-Lewinsky matter locked down tight...
...and, second, that "nowhere does [Kenneth Starr] use the word 'perjury'" in his impeachment referral to Congress...
...If a president may lie under oath about sex, what else may he lie about...
...of the University of Virginia announced that presidential impeachment is a bad idea in general...
...A comprehensive political-military strategy to remove Saddam will require more: It will involve establishing liberated zones in Iraq where the Iraqi opposition can rally and offer a credible alternative to Saddam's regime...
...Unrebutted by anyone on the Constitution Subcommittee, Pollitt contended, first, that U.S...
...interests imperiled...
...Follow the bizarre logic of this argument: The fact that Congress is still theoretically capable of impeaching Clinton is itself proof that Clinton should not be impeached...
...As we go to press, the Clinton administration appears to be on the verge of launching military action against Iraq...
...It was left to three Democratic experts at last week's hearing to outline a better-than-laughable brief against Clinton's impeachment...
...Drinan, who was unprepared to acknowledge that a president guilty of murder might be subject to removal from office, offered a brief history of the Constitution's impeachment clause—and then rested his case simply on Clinton's persistent popularity...
...They have long since been adequately addressed by the newspaper funny pages, according to Rep...
...And most of us, quite suddenly, seem to believe it...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...of Harvard and Father Robert Drinan of Georgetown, have reached a stage of their lives at which they clearly imagine their ornamental presence alone to be enough to settle any debate...
...If, on the other hand, he is at last serious and acts to remove the threat of Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, he will deserve support, and praise...
...And it will require an American commitment to use force, both from the air and on the ground, to defend those zones...
...It "fails the legitimacy test," both men agreed, to impeach a president who retains majority support...
...Jerrold Nadler, something that bears comparison to "the 17thcentury Court of Star Chamber or to a Moscow show trial of the 1930s...
...And, by extension, the only president ripe for impeachment is a president so tyrannical that he has rendered Congress unable actually to pull it off...
...The impeachment provision "should never have been put in...
...Fancy talk about how Saddam might be "kept in a box" or made to live by the rules of the game has been utterly discredited...
...appears to be an idiot...
...To be sure, not every minority witness was truly up to his assigned task...
...The country hardly needs now to fear, in our view, the prospect of excessively exacting standards for presidential integrity...
...It was once an elemental principle that the president, surely the president, must obey the law...
...It is a "jihad" and a "witch hunt," according to Rep...
...Matthew Holden Jr...
...Pollitt was the only subcommittee witness last week who definitively concluded that Clinton cannot be impeached because he "did not commit perjury...
...We think it will come to this, anyway...
...Chicago's Cass Sun-stein, Georgetown's Susan Low Bloch, and Harvard's Laurence Tribe allowed as how a president might be subject to impeachment for certain crimes not directly related to his official responsibilities...
...district judge Susan Webber Wright has ruled testimony about Monica Lewinsky "not material" and "totally irrelevant" to the Paula Jones litigation...
...But last week's hearing was not entirely without value, for some kind of serious answer to these questions did indeed emerge from the parade of expert academic witnesses the Democrats had called...
...It would be better to make this clear at the beginning, and to begin preparing public opinion and building up the necessary military forces sooner rather than later...
...It is well that Professor Pollitt has retired from full-time law-school instruction...
...The middle-ground policy of containment—featuring sanctions, inspections regimes, and diplomatic pressure, punctuated with occasional "whack-a-mole" cruise-missile strikes—was never sustainable...
...On what basis are we to resolve the controversy...
...It has now collapsed...
...Those standards, to the contrary, are plummeting before our very eyes...
...Daniel Pollitt, professor emeritus of the University of North Carolina, seems to be either woefully ignorant or willfully dishonest...
...Why any of this might be true—and why they now believe it is unacceptable even to consider impeaching Bill Clinton for the crimes alleged against him—the subcommittee's minority did not say...
...Both of these "facts" are pure fiction...
...That is the best thing about it—and also much the worst...
...This proposed impeachment doctrine has obvious problems of consistency...
...Ten short months ago, it would have been thought inconceivable that a president who was convincingly alleged to have committed systematic felonies of any kind could keep his job...
...Schlesinger cited the midterm election and the "strictly partisan" current critique of the president to much the same effect...
...For the "slippery slope" argument Sunstein, Bloch, and Tribe mount against Bill Clinton's impeachment brutally rebuts itself...
...Now, finally, there is broad agreement in Congress and, we suspect, even within the Clinton administration that the only solution to the present crisis is doing what is necessary to remove Saddam from power...
...Since last January, we have been arguing that the United States faces only two choices in dealing with Saddam Hussein: either remove him from power or learn to live with a dictator in Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction...
...We trust that the bombing campaign will be large, sustained, and aimed at the destruction of Saddam's conventional as well as unconventional military capabilities...
...We concede that public opinion does not share our alarm at this devel-opment—and that impeachment of this disgraceful president is an increasingly remote possibility as a result...
...Iraq is Bill Clinton's supreme foreign-policy test...
...But they rejected setting a bright-line standard for impeachment at perjury...
...But we continue to hope against hope that Republicans in Congress will find the courage to do their unpopular duty anyway...
...If we have a short-term military action that changes nothing, all he will be doing is passing on this crisis to the next president, with U.S...
...The continuing controversy over those charges...
...To which he added two original fillips of his own...
...John Conyers...
...Maxine Waters suggested, the "long-standing fallout of drugs and the CIA issue that I've been working on for the past two years...
...Think about that for a moment...
...Frankly," he observed last Monday, "they made a mistake" when they drafted the Constitution in 1787...
...At the end of the day, the best that can be said for a "Lewinsky exemption" to impeachment is that it accurately reflects what is apparently a gut-level majority sentiment in America...
...In at least some of the exhaustively footnoted testimony, a reasonably coherent defense of the president was finally revealed—rea-sonably coherent, but frightening...
...Bill Clinton is not such a president...
...Garry Trudeau dismissed that a few weeks ago...
...They allowed as how perjury might qualify as such a crime...
...And once we're done, then what...
...Before long, in other words, we would be impeaching presidents for all manner of felony violations...
...Neither Congress nor the courts are disabled, or under any potentiality of being disabled, or the president would not now be on the defensive...
...Neither man bothered to explain why, if that is true, the Framers directly anticipated this very circumstance—by empowering the Senate to ban such a president, upon conviction, from any future public office...
...We need look no further, every Democrat insisted, than recent election results and poll numbers...
...Congressional leaders should certainly insist on that much...
...Because perjury "about sex," in these professors' judgment, just doesn't cut it...
...So last Monday, at the House Constitution Subcommittee hearing on standards for presidential impeachment, they felt no need to engage in any serious debate about the foreordained result...
...Honesty, however, requires that we squarely confront a further reality: The only sure way to remove Saddam is to send in American ground troops to complete the job that should have been completed in 1991...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 11
