November 11, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Coup at Home
By FRANK RICH
As Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.
General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized
“ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington
to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a
White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor
bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that
Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This
didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently
negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern
Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says
“there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said,
“I believe him.”
Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of
London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on
this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more
thriving terrorist haven than ever.
Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10
billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry
more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it
in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a
prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended
the constitution.
But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story,
and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess,
as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just
another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our
mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a
harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will
not be so easily eradicated.
In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11,
our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can
resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places
like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to
democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with
bipartisan support and we barely shrug.
This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not
necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected
Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry
assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have
brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from
within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch
has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The
results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a
blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.
More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the
world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush
repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005
inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert
on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in
branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our
habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who
control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of
warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert
our values.
Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf,
there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on.
Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president
has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly
emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.
Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our
president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But
earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed,
threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that
corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to
defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto
Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded
United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them
without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.
Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General
Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with
language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges.
The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship
with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a
prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas
corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising
F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush
administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score:
Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no
express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”
To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the
Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion
inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and
unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race,
where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make
no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo,
see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of
constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven
record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11
he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in
defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is
that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like
Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they
argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as
horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might
get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of
Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to
move on.
In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to
confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney
general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal
under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new
bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey
pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such
legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some
miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing
statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a
bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.
That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic
to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force
shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all
these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging
General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.
Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that
the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly
despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans
believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as
the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew
surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical
depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation
apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party
they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.