I doubt that it has anything to do with short term advantage in the next election or the even more retarded and insincere plea that the public is tired of impeachments, as if a day in traffic court were evidence no one was going to watch the OJ trial when it happened.
No, the real agenda is not even to protect Bush and Cheney.
It is to protect the business interests that called for the war and even more importantly, to keep the real reasons and decision-making process for using military force out of the general public consciousness.
After World War I, a fair number of Americans seemed to figure out that only the financial brahmins benefited from the war or were even in any danger as Marine Corps Gen. Smedley Butler said in "War Is a Racket:"
An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:
"There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost.
We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.
If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money...and Germany won't.
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/anti-govt/war-is-a-racket.htmIt took a couple of decades of bad education to get us to the point that most Americans believe our war propaganda because they have no knowledge of the rest of world to contradict it, and know less about economics and how business interests affect their lives than semi-literate peasants in Bolivia know.
That carefully cultivated ignorance would be dispelled if the real reasons for the war were not only part of the impeachment proceedings, but was written into every history textbook from sixth grade on up telling about the only president to be impeached for starting a war, which makes the presidents who was too nice to the South after the Civil War, the one who covered up burglaries, and the one who had sex with a fat intern look not only trivial but boring by comparison.
People would remember this.
Kids would talk about it when they started to learn about presidents a hundred years from now.
Without impeachment, it will be like Vietnam. As disliked as the war was, within a decade or so, the public memory of it was already going soft around the edges, and presidents and chamber of commerce flaks could trot out the same arguments again because they were never authoritatively declared self-serving lies when they were told before.
Without impeachment, not only will we be vulnerable to the same manipulation again, but in a few decades, the Iraq War would fade into the same oblivion where even our successful wars of conquest like the Spanish–American War or the Mexican-American War have gone, the latter unknown even to schoolchildren in classrooms in Santa Fe, Palo Alto, and Santa Ana, all prizes from that war.
If someone says Bush shouldn't be impeached, it is probably because they can imagine some future profit paid for by our tax dollars, soldiers lives, and kids who don' speak English getting their brains blown out, arms burned off, or smothered in a pile of rubble before they are old enough to say their first word.
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