Truthout: The "Stab in the Back" Trap
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042707L.shtmlThe "Stab in the Back" Trap
By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributors
Friday 27 April 2007
The Democrats and the peace movement are walking into a trap.
The Republicans are preparing with Rovian cunning to focus the mind of the public on the question: Who lost Iraq?
And they are already giving the answer: The Democrats and the peace movement.
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What's necessary to evade this trap is to define the war itself - rather than just the fact that America is losing it - as wrong. It is wrong because we were lied into it by a rogue executive intent on launching an illegal war and occupation, in violation of national and international law, the US Constitution and the UN Charter. And it is wrong because it has imposed an illegal occupation that has systematically violated the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act.
The means to define Bush's war for the American people are at hand in the power of Congress to investigate executive branch actions. We are seeing that power being flexed in the use of subpoenas for documents and testimony by committees investigating the firings of US attorneys. But, so far, investigation of illegal war, occupation, torture and rendition has been pusillanimous at best.
What's become of the investigations of the origins and conduct of the war and occupation that Democrats promised when they took over Congress at the start of 2007? According to a Congressional aide quoted in the April 25 Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have assigned staff members to monitor "what fights we're picking and how we're picking them." If so, they've assiduously avoided picking any fights that might implicate the Bush administration's "war on terror" in violations of US and international law. (The first break in this complicity of Congressional Democrats in the Bush administration's cover-up may be the 21-to-10 vote of Rep. Henry Waxman's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to authorize a subpoena requiring Condoleezza Rice to testify about the yellowcake uranium fraud.)
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