George McGovern/Wed Jan 17, 12:57 PM ET/
The Nation -- I'm glad to be back at the National Press Club.
Indeed, at the age of eighty-four, I'm glad to be anywhere. In my
younger years when the subject of aging came up, trying to sound
worldly wise, I would say, "It doesn't matter so much the number of
years you have, but what you do with those years." I don't say that
anymore. I now want to reach a hundred. Why? Because I thoroughly
enjoy life and there are so many things I must still do before
entering the mystery beyond. The most urgent of these is to get
American soldiers out of the Iraqi hellhole Bush-Cheney and their
neoconservative theorists have created in what was once called the
cradle of civilization. It is believed to be the location of the
Garden of Eden. I mention the neoconservative theorists to recall
Walter Lippman's observance, "There is nothing so dangerous as a
belligerent professor"
One of the things I miss about my eighteen years in the US Senate
are the stories of the old Southern Democrats. I didn't always vote
with them, but I loved their technique of responding to an
opponent's questions with a humorous story. Once when Senator Sam
Ervin of North Carolina had to handle a tough question from Mike
Mansfield, he said, "You know, Mr. Leader, that question reminds me
of the old Baptist preacher who was telling a class of Sunday school
boys the creation story. 'God created Adam and Eve and from this
union came two sons, Cain and Abel and thus the human race
developed.' A boy in the class then asked, 'Reverend, where did Cain
and Abel get their wives?' After frowning for a moment, the preacher
replied, 'Young man--it's impertinent questions like that that's
hurtin' religion.'"
Well, Mr. Bush, Jr. I have some impertinent questions for you.
Mr. President, Sir, when reporter Bob Woodward asked you if you had
consulted with your father before ordering our army into Iraq you
said, "No, he's not the father you call on a decision like this. I
talked to my heavenly Father above." My question, Mr. President: If
God asked you to bombard, invade and occupy Iraq for four years, why
did he send an opposite message to the Pope? Did you not know that
your father, George Bush, Sr., his Secretary of State James Baker
and his National Security Advisor General Scowcroft were all opposed
to your invasion? Wouldn't you, our troops, the American people and
the Iraqis all be much better off if you had listened to your more
experienced elders including your earthly father? Instead of blaming
God for the awful catastrophe you have unleashed in Iraq, wouldn't
it have been less self-righteous if you had fallen back on the
oft-quoted explanation of wrongdoing, "The devil made me do it?"
And Mr. President, after the 9/11 hit against the Twin Towers in New
York, which gained us the sympathy and support of the entire world,
why did you then order the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do
with 9/11? Are you aware that your actions destroyed the
international reservoir of good will towards the United States? What
is the cost to America of shattering the standing and influence of
our country in the eyes of the world?
Why, Mr. President did you pressure the CIA to report falsely that
Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction including nuclear
weapons? And when you ordered your Secretary of State, Colin Powell,
to go to New York and present to the UN the Administration's
"evidence" that Iraq was an imminent nuclear threat to the United
States, were you aware that after reading this deceitful statement
to the UN, Mr. Powell told an aide that the so-called evidence was
"bullshit"?
Is it reasonable to you, President Bush, that Colin Powell told you
near the end of your first term that he would not be in your
Administration if you were to receive a second term? What decent
person could survive two full terms of forced lying and deceit?
And Mr. President, how do you enjoy your leisure time, and how can
you sleep at night knowing that 3,014 young Americans have died in a
war you mistakenly ordered? What do you say to the 48,000 young
Americans who have been crippled for life in mind or body? What is
your reaction to the conclusion of the leading British medical
journal (Lancet) that since you ordered the bombardment and
occupation of Iraq four years ago, 600,000 Iraqi men, women and
children have been killed? What do you think of the destruction of
the Iraqi's homes, their electrical and water systems, their public
buildings?
And Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, while neither of you has ever been in
combat (Mr. Cheney asking and receiving five deferments from the
Vietnam War), have you not at least read or been briefed on the
terrible costs of that ill-advised and seemingly endless American
war in tiny Vietnam? Do you realize that another Texas President,
Lyndon Baines Johnson, declined to seek a second term in part
because he had lost his credibility over the disastrous war in
Vietnam? Are you aware that one of the chief architects of that war,
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, resigned his office and years
later published a book declaring that the war was all a tragic
mistake? Do you know this recent history in which 58,000 young
Americans died in the process of killing 2 million Vietnamese men,
women and children? If you do not know about this terrible blunder
in Vietnam, are you not ignoring the conclusion of one of our great
philosophers: "Those who are ignorant of history are condemned to
repeat it." And, Mr. President, in your ignorance of the lessons of
Vietnam, are you not condemning our troops and our people to repeat
the same tragedy in Iraq?
During the long years between 1963 and 1975 when I fought to end the
American war in Vietnam, first as a US Senator from South Dakota and
then as my party's nominee for President, my four daughters ganged
up on my one night. "Dad, why don't you give up this battle? You've
been speaking out against this crazy war since we were little kids.
When you won the Democratic presidential nomination, you got snowed
under by President Nixon." In reply I said, "Just remember that
sometimes in history even a tragic mistake produces something good.
The good about Vietnam is that it is such a terrible blunder, we'll
never go down that road again." Mr. President, we're going down that
road again. So, what do I tell my daughters? And what do you tell
your daughters?
Mr. President, I do not speak either as a pacifist or a draft
dodger. I speak as one who after the attack on Pearl Harbor,
volunteered at the age of nineteen for the Army Air Corps and flew
thirty-five missions as a B-24 bomber. I believed in that war then
and I still do sixty-five years later. And so did the rest of
America. Mr. President, are you missing the intellectual and moral
capacity to know the difference between a justified war and a war of
folly in Vietnam or Iraq?
Public opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the American people
think that the war in Iraq has been a mistake on your part. It is
widely believed that this war was the central reason Democrats
captured control of both houses of Congress. Polls among the people
of Iraq indicate that nearly all Iraqis want our military presence
in their country for the last four years to end now. Why do you
persist in defying public opinion in both the United States and Iraq
and throughout the other countries around the globe? Do you see
yourself as omniscient? What is your view of the doctrine of
self-determination, which we Americans hold dear?
And wonder of wonders, Mr. President, after such needless death and
destruction, first in the Vietnamese jungle and now in the Arabian
desert, how can you order 21,500 more American troops to Iraq? Are
you aware that as the war in Vietnam went from bad to worse, our
leaders sent in more troops and wasted more billions of dollars
until we had 550,000 US troops in that little country? It makes me
shudder as an aging bomber pilot to remember that we dropped more
bombs on the Vietnamese and their country than the total of all the
bombs dropped by all the air forces around the world in World War
II. Do you, Mr. President, honestly believe that we need tens of
thousands of additional troops plus a supplemental military
appropriation of $200 billion before we can bring our troops home
from this nightmare in ancient Baghdad?
In your initial campaign for the Presidency, Mr. Bush, you described
yourself as a "compassionate conservative". What is compassionate
about consigning America's youth to a needless and seemingly endless
war that has now lasted longer than World War II? And what is
conservative about reducing the taxes needed to finance this war and
instead running our national debt to nine trillion dollars with
money borrowed from China, Japan, Germany and Britain? Is this wild
deficit financing your idea of conservatism? Mr. President, how can
a true conservative be indifferent to the steadily rising cost of a
war that claims over $7 billion a month, $237 million every day? Are
you troubled to know as a conservative that just the interest on our
skyrocketing national debt is $760,000 every day. Mr. President, our
Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, estimates that if
the war were to continue until 2010 as you have indicated it might,
the cost would be over a trillion dollars.
Perhaps, Mr. President, you should ponder the words of a genuine
conservative - England's nineteenth-century member of Parliament,
Edmund Burke: "A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in
blood"
And, Mr. President at a time when your most respected generals have
concluded that the chaos and conflict in Iraq cannot be resolved by
more American dollars and more American young bodies, do you ever
consider the needs here at home of our own anxious and troubled
society? What about the words of another true conservative, General
and President Dwight Eisenhower who said that, "Every gun that is
made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those
who are cold and not clothed."
And, Mr. President, would not you and all the rest of us do well to
ponder the farewell words of President Eisenhower: "In the councils
of government, we must guard against the acquisition of the
unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will
persist."
Finally, Mr. President, I ask have you kept your oath of office to
uphold the Constitution when you use what you call the war on
terrorism to undermine the Bill of Rights? On what constitutional
theory do you seize and imprison suspects without charge, sometimes
torturing them in foreign jails? On what constitutional or legal
basis have you tapped the phones of Americans without approval of
the courts as required by law? Are you above the Constitution, above
the law, and above the Geneva accords? If we are fighting for
freedom in Iraq as you say, why are you so indifferent to protecting
liberty here in America?
Many Americans are now saying in effect, "The American war in Iraq
has created a horrible mess but how can we now walk away from it?"
William Polk, a former Harvard and University of Chicago professor
of Middle East Studies and a former State Department expert on the
Middle East, has teamed up with me on a recent book requested by
Simon and Schuster. It is entitled, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan
for Withdrawal Now. I feel awkward praising it, so I give you the
respected journalist of the New York Times, and now of Newsweek,
Anna Quindlen who told Charlie Rose on his excellent TV program:
"There is a wonderful book I am recommending to everyone. It's a
very small, readable book by George McGovern and William Polk called
Out of Iraq. And it just very quickly runs you through the history
of the country, the makeup of the country, how we got in, the
arguments for getting in--many of which don't withstand
scrutiny--and how we can get out. It's like a little primer. I think
the entire nation should read it and then we will be united."
If you need a second for the judgment of Anna Quindlen, I give you
the esteemed Library Journal: "In this crisp and cogently argued
book, former Senator McGovern and scholar Polk offer a trenchant and
straightforward critique of the war in Iraq. What makes their highly
readable book unique is that it not only argues why the United
States needs to disengage militarily from Iraq now...but also
clearly delineates practical steps for troop withdrawal...Essential
reading for anybody who wants to cut through the maze of confusion
that surrounds current US policy in Iraq, this book is highly
recommended for public and academic libraries."
Professor Polk is a descendant of President Polk and the brother of
the noted George Polk, is here today from his home in southern
France and he will join me at the podium as I conclude this
impartial interrogation of President Bush. And now, members of the
National Press Club and your guests, it's your turn to cross-examine
Bill Polk and me in, of course, an equally impartial manner.
