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We must resolve now to do all within our power to remove George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other civil officers who bear responsibility for the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration from office, by impeachment, as the Constitution requires us to do.
While he remains president, George W. Bush will not let anything stand in the way of his plans to attack Iran. When the National Intelligence Estimate disclosed in early December 2007 that Iran had abandoned plans to develop nuclear weapons several years earlier, President Bush conceded he knew this even when he spoke months earlier of "World War III" with Iran. Rather than offering a ray of hope that his plans for Iran might change, on the day the new Intelligence Estimate was announced, he responded that Iran has been a threat, is still a threat, will remain a threat, and that sanctions against Iran must be tightened.
Against this background, President Bush has proclaimed, "Iran must come clean." He defies the reports of his own intelligence agencies stating that Iran has no nuclear arms programs, just as he falsely presented his own intelligence agency reports about Iraq in 2003, when he claimed they showed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda.
At the very time President Bush threatens other countries he claims are determined to produce nuclear weapons, he presides over an expansion of U.S. nuclear arms, perfecting old nuclear weapons systems while developing a new generation of nuclear weapons, primarily tactical and therefore more usable because of their limited destruction. He presses on for nuclear defense system "star wars" virtually on Russia’s border, in Poland and the Czech Republic, compelling Russia and others to decide whether to submit to U.S. domination, or prepare an equivalent nuclear arsenal and missile defense. All this happens while the humanitarian plight in Iraq is the symbol of the consequences of resisting U.S. demands.
If President Bush wanted to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, rather than attempting to bully small nations by criminal threats while he develops tactical nuclear weapons (that can be effectively used against armed resistance without destroying an entire city), he would invoke and revitalize the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. That Treaty expressed as its desire "...the ceasing of international tension and strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stock piles, and the elimination from their arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means for their delivery..."
Under the Treaty, the vast majority of all nations, those which possessed no nuclear weapons, delivery systems, or technical knowledge for their production, agreed "not to manufacture, or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons.. or seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons." (Article II)
In return, the nations which possessed nuclear weapons, believed at the time to number only five, agreed with all nations to "...pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament ... under strict and effective international control." (Article VI).
Only such an approach can hope to avoid a prolonged struggle to end imperial domination which possesses a monopoly of nuclear arms. Any people who want to be free will not submit to demands that they not acquire the most effective deterrent to foreign military aggression against them.
The American people approach the end of 2007 with one year remaining in the disastrous elective terms of the Presidency of George W. Bush. He has committed, authorized and condoned the most grievous and costly crimes against peace, within war and against humanity. He has assaulted the most basic American freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights and Constitution, violated provisions creating our form of government and redirected our economy to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, all with impunity.
In the face of all that he has done, a supine Congress, cowed by Bush’s strut and bullying glamorized in the major media and silently supported by wealth and corporate power, submit to his demands, as witness by the incredible vote in the Senate on December 18, 2007 to add $70 billion to Bush’s military budget request and to reject any provision for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Within his remaining year he plans and openly threatens new wars of aggression with Iran a chosen target and the expansion of arbitrary and illegal polices that threaten our most cherished values, the political, physical and economic environments in which we live and the honor of our country among nations.
His conduct informs his successors that they, too, can take virtually any action they choose outside the law and without the consent of the governed and get away with it, because the American people do not have the will, which is all it takes, to stop the most self-destructive and unconscionable acts.
Once again, it is oil that motivates President Bush to attack, this time Iran. In addition to its own oil, the Bush Cabal sees Iran as the major threat to U.S. domination of oil resources in the entire Middle East. Iran now has enormous political power within Iraq, far more than the U.S., as a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion and shift in power there to Shia Muslim leadership aligned with Iran.
Iran is by far the largest and most powerful nation in the Persian Gulf region which includes the vast oil resources of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.
The enormous military expenditures of the Bush Administration are politically possible only in war time and a climate of fear. They are an important means of redistributing wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich who reap the profits. The arms they produce are also the means for dominating and exploiting other countries.
The new arms race which President Bush seeks, prepares the U.S. for aggression while consolidating a society controlled by wealth which he believes is the best form of government.
The U.S. cannot be credible under the Bush Administration. It has lost all credibility. In addition to its overt aggression and war mongering, its secretive uses and public denial of torture, subversion and surveillance, the Bush Administration claims the right to withhold from the Congress, the Courts and the People information essential to informed judgment and the duties of officials and citizens. Even activities of U.S. Attorneys offices are compromised, in domestic prosecution of political opposition, which can destroy the integrity of the electoral process.
President Bush has invoked "State Secrets" claims to reject disclosure of the conduct of his government 39 times in seven years. In comparison, during the 25 years of the Shah’s reign from 1953 to 1979 and at the height of the Cold War which presented an immeasurably greater potential for destruction and far more espionage and spying, six Presidents from Eisenhower to Carter, invoked "State Secrets" claims a total of 6 times.
President Bush’s conduct of government cannot stand the light of day. We, the People, and the future of our country, are the principle victims of his secrecy.
Iran will not submit to President Bush’s threats, or succumb to his assault. The Iranian people hold the United States largely responsible for their suffering over the past half century. This is why Iran acts as it does. It was the U.S. that removed Iran’s democratically-elected president Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and placed the Shah once again on the Peacock Throne. William Colby, who later served as Director of the CIA, called it the "greatest achievement of the CIA." For twenty five years, Iranians lived under an ever more repressive tyranny that was radically westernizing and industrializing their country. From 1973 through 1977, more than 1/4 of all government expenditures were for the military. Iran purchased more than 1/3 of all U.S. foreign arms sales during this period. Between 1972 and 1976, the Shah purchased $26 billion dollars in sophisticated arms from the U.S., helping subsidize entire new weapons systems for the U.S. itself. The Shah’s Army had more tanks than the British Army. His air force had Sidewinder missiles from the United States not sold to any other country.
Iran under the Shah was an important U.S. military surrogate, bordering the Soviet Union, a buffer between it and the oil rich countries of the Gulf, even offering important surveillance of Soviet missile testing and military maneuvers in neighboring areas.
The Shah’s secret police, the notorious Savak, had agents everywhere, including college campuses in the U.S. in violation of U.S. law. More than 100,000 Iranian students were enrolled here, financed by their government. Terror reigned across Iran and its prisons groaned with tortured opponents of the Shah.
President Carter fully accepted the Shah’s Iran both militarily and economically. It was a major regional base for U.S. corporations. He celebrated his first New Year’s eve as President in Tehran, December 31, 1977. The White House released President Carter’s toast to the Shah on that occasion. He called Iran an island of stability in a sea of turmoil and praised the Shah’s human rights record.
As the Iranian people realized their shared abhorrence for the Shah’s regime they began non-violent protests across the country. By 1976 and through 1978, a million people, or more, repeatedly took to the streets of Tehran and in cities across the country marching against their own government. I joined them on more than one occasion. Girls would try to stick rose stems down the barrels of the rifles of soldiers, who were everywhere, asking "Why do you kill us? We are your sisters."
The death toll rose. On Black Friday, in early September 1978, machine guns fired from helicopters hovering a hundred feet above marchers in Jaleh Square, and from the ground around the square, killed near two thousand, many dressed in burial shrouds. Wails of mourners could be heard at great distances around large cemeteries full of fresh graves outside the city.
The Shah caused as many deaths as he dared, over 40,000, that last year. Then realizing he could not overcome the people despite all his legions and ruthlessness, he fled in the cold of winter on January 16, 1979.
The prisons were quickly forced open by the people who had been massed in front of them for weeks. I never expect to see a more radical achievement in prison reform than Qasr prison in Tehran between my visit in early January 1979 and May 1979 when I mext entered it. Earlier every cell and usable space was jammed with thousands of hungry, beaten, ragged men, most young, many sick, guarded by middle-aged men uniformed like a Royal Honor Guard. By May, the prison was nearly empty, the few hundred prisoners, middle aged and older, many former guards, dressed in fine suits, or uniforms needing only cleaning and pressing, in separate rooms with beds, tables, T.V., books, fresh fruits and other gifts in baskets, guarded by a comparative handful of still ragged young men, most former prisoners.
Desertions in the Iranian Army and Air Force reached 50% and higher within months after the Shah’s flight. Savak agents and notorious military officers were hunted down. Many were murdered where found, such was the pent up fury.
On January 31, 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned triumphantly from fifteen years of exile, nearly all spent in Iraq. It was his voice on tape cassettes played in the comparative security of mosques, but available in the bazaars and on the streets where poor people lived, that rallied much of the religious opposition to the Shah. His support among the people was passionate and overwhelming. But he had no taste for governing and those who undertook the task, good men like Mehdi Bazargan, who in common with many experienced the Shah’s prisons first hand, lacked the power to direct the government.
I had met Ayatolhah Khomeini in Paris on January 22, 1979 and described the huge crowds in the streets and joy of the people we found in Tehran the night the Shah fled. I had returned there from a town called Gazvin where I was investigating a military assault on people waiting for heating oil, resulting in injuries, deaths and the pursuit by the military and arrest of wounded persons taken to the hospital there. I described my meeting late that night with the Shah’s new Prime Minister, Shahpour Bahktar, how he seemed a prisoner of an armed officer in his office and sat despondently at his large desk with a portrait of the Shah leaning against the wall behind him on one side, apparently taken down from directly behind his desk and on his other side a portrait of former President Mohammed Mosedeqh which he apparently planned to replace the Shah’s portrait.
I related to him the words of William Sullivan, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran from my meeting with him the next morning as he sat despondently behind his desk. Sullivan said the lesson from all that happened is such uprisings "must be crushed before they start."
Ayatollah Khomeini had several difficult rhetorical questions for me. "If the U.S. is a democracy, why do its people permit such a policy against the people of Iran?" "If President Carter sincerely supports human rights, how can he support the Shah?"
By April Prime Minister Bazargan asked me to return to Iran. I had expressed concern about public non-judicial trials conducted by independent groups calling themselves Komitehs. Summary executions by Komitehs had begun within a month, or six weeks after the Shah fled and were approaching 100. Bazargan explained that while he held the title of Prime Minister he had no real power, or significant public support. Ayatollah Komeini, who possessed enormous power, was needed in Tehran to assure the enforcement of government policies, but he had returned to religious activities in Qom, the holy city he loved. The government was powerless and paralyzed without him.
Bazargan asked me to accompany him to Qom. We drove there and met immediately with Ayatollah Khomeini. He assured us that he too opposed the summary trials and extra judicial executions, but said their immediate prohibition would be difficult to enforce and harmful. He believed they could be successfully curtailed and stopped altogether before they reached 200.
Bazargan had no success in his request that Ayatollah Khomeini return to Tehran to lend his moral force to efforts by the government to implement programs essential to demonstrate its ability to function. The Ayatollah declined. He was totally involved in religious activity in Qom.
Ayatollah Khomeini did ask us to join him on a flight to Esfahan. There he spoke to a huge throng, the largest sea of humanity I have ever seen, near delirious from the presence and words of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was as if he had liberated them from a generation of tyranny. There could be no doubt where the people placed their trust.
On the plane back, Ayatollah Khomeini asked me the same questions about democracy in America and the sincerity of President Carter’s commitment to human rights he had asked in Paris. My answers seemed no more satisfying than the first time, though he knew better than anyone how long it had taken the Iranian people to unite in their opposition to the Shah’s tyranny. The exercise of truly democratic power by the people in mass is rare throughout history and is inherently overwhelmingly non-violent because its numbers cannot easily be, and need not be, organized for violence. Once there is a dominant and passionate level of unity to a cause among a people, its force is irresistable and will remain so for as long as the commitment to that cause continues.
When I returned to Iran in August of 1979 conditions had changed. The Tehran University where most of my associations were based had been closed. There were large crowds protesting in front of the U.S. Embassy. Embassy personnel were reduced and largly restricted to Embassy quarters. Bruce Laingen, the Charge d’ Affairs, ran the Embassy in the protracted absence of Ambassador Sullivan. Laingen called and asked me to meet him.
We ate alone that night in the courtyard behind the Embassy where the night before a rifle fired missile had destroyed the Embassy satellite communications system. He asked me whether I could arrange a meeting for him with Prime Minister Bazargan. Walking through basement tunnels to visit Marine Embassy guards who were barracked there, I saw piles of large clear plastic bags full of shredded documents, later patiently put together by young Iranians over a period of many months to document wrongful acts of the U.S. toward Iran. Early the next morning a new visa office built in a corner against the wall surrounding the huge Embassy grounds was fire bombed.
Later that morning I picked Mr. Laingen up in a taxi and we drove to meet Bazargan and foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi. He had not been outside the Embassy grounds in weeks. Laingen asked Bazargan and Yazdi for Iranian military protection for the Embassy. In a lenghty and cordial meeting, both men explained that the presence of Iranian military protecting the U.S. Embassy would draw enormous crowds in protest and the military could not be relied on to repel their own people under existing conditions.
While both men were totally committed to the revolution, the sympathies of both as Iranian leaders were clearly in favor of releasing the hostages. Two of Bazargan’s children had college degrees from the U.S., his son a masters degree from the University of Illinois. Yazdi lived in the U.S. in Houston, for twenty years, exiled from Iran. I had spoken to Iranian student groups that Yazdi helped organize on many campuses.
Laingen realized they were right about the use of Iranian troops, accepted their analysis and promised to keep in close contact. On November 4, the crowds, mostly students, burst into the U.S. Embassy and took 100 hostages. Yazdi called Laingen that first day and expressed his hope that the hostages would be released by the next morning. It didn’t happen. Bazargan and Yazdi resigned.
Early on November 4, President Carter asked me to go to Iran as his representative to try to negotiate the hostage release. I said that I should travel alone without publicity. The President’s advisors felt publicity of his efforts to free the hostages was more important than any advantage from my working alone. The press filmed me boarding Air Force II at Langley Field outside Washington. The Iranian leadership read that I was coming as President Carter’s representative and Ayatollah Khomeini announced I would not be allowed into the country as a representative of the American President.
There was a team of people on board Air Force II I did not know. They left when I was denied admission. Among them was a man I next met in February 1991 in the Ambassador’s residence in Baghdad during the third week of the Gulf War when I went there to meet American personnel held there. He had entered Iraq shortly before the war began. He was apparently an expert on how to cope as a hostage. This group was released in the early spring.
I worked the phones from the U.S. Consul General’s residence in Istanbul for a week trying to make a breakthrough, receiving assurances I was personally welcome in Iran at any time, but not as President Carter’s representative. An important opportunity to end a crisis that was economically devastating for Iran and politically devastating for the U.S. was lost. The students released the women, blacks and persons in poor health quietly, but the majority were held until January 20, 1981 when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated President.
In late December of 1979 the Soviet Union sent 30,000 troops into Afghanistan increasing their number to 80,000 during 1980, and creating unrest and tension througout the region. There followed a long and bloody struggle in which the U.S. recruited thousands of Muslims from the U.S. and many other nations to expel the USSR from Afghanistan contributing to Soviet withdrawal, its economic decline and opening Afghanistan to Taliban control and to the emergence of Osama Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda.
I returned to Iran in May of 1980 to attend a conference condemning U.S. imperialism, in which I joined. At the same time I urged release of all the hostages as wrongful and harmful, agreeing to take their place to no avail.
On September 22 of 1980, Iraq invaded Khuzistan province in Iran on the southern most border between the two nations home to more than a million Arabs and rich oil fields. Henry Kissinger said he hoped they killed each other, which was also U.S. policy. The U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s government in the war with AWAC intelligence and other aid.
Once powerful Iran had been so weakened between the Shah’s departure in 1979 and the invasion in 1980, that Iraq with less than one third the population of Iran, dared invade.
The war, senseless and brutal, was fought fiercely until 1988. One million young men died, 750,000 of them Iranians, many in their mid teens.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a student leader in opposition to the Shah. He suffered the Shah’s tyranny, U.S. imperial acts in Iran and the region and the disastrous war with Iraq in common with all his country. Much of the present leadership in Iran is older than him. Many suffered more.
Iran has struggled to recover and stabilize since the end of the war with Iraq, affected throughout by regional turmoil, the sanctions placed on Iraq on August 6, 1990, the Gulf War in January-March, 1991, and U.S. attacks against Iraq from 1991-2003, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and the allout war of aggression against Iraq in March 2003, the violent occupation of both since and the sanctions placed on Iran itself.
Iran has witnessed the U.S. subversion of Iranian democracy, Iranian demonization by the U.S., the military power of the U.S. and its ruthless employment by President Bush and the human disaster the U.S. has wreaked on Iraq, the unbearable human misery there, a million dead, 5 million refugees, 3 million in exile from their own country.
Iran will seek to avoid U.S. assault and domination by all available means. It knows it cannot trust the United States under the Bush President. It has not only more than three times the population of Iraq, its territory is again greater, its present condition infinitely stronger than Iraq in 2003 and its military force much greater. It has also learned the lessons of Shock and Awe and the U.S. occupation of Iraq and will strike back if attacked.
Americans must understand how we are seen by the vast majority of the Iranians and why: A gift most often denied, as Robert Burns decried. Then we will never again tolerate such aggressions by our country.
We now have close to one million registered votes for impeachment. That is a large number standing alone. But the nation is 300 million, close to half are of voting age. Not one citizen in 150 of voting age has voted for impeachment. Those of us who believe impeachment is imperative must assume the responsibility to arouse the American people to embrace the impeachment issue and the threat to the future the Bush Administration poses.
People in all walks of life are deeply concerned and have taken courageous action to speak out on the aspect of President Bush’s conduct that concerns them most.
Two recent and similar acts, expensive and potentially harmful to those who acted, involve ads in the New York Times.
On November 18, 2007, a full page ad in the N.Y. Times drafted by scholars at the Yale Divinity School and endorsed by a group of 300 Christian theologians and leaders responded to an earlier open letter dated October 13, 2007, to leaders of Christian Churches everywhere, from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics including "...top leaders from around the world representing every major school of Islamic thought." The Christian response embraces the Muslim statement that "Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world..." and proclaims that "the future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians." This is a direct reaction to President Bush’s "war on terrorism", which is in fact a war on Islam.
The second full page ad ran on December 4, 2007. It is signed by four retired US. Army Generals and an Air Force Colonel. Its short text under the top half of the page which is only the bold face word - IRAN- casting as shadow its gray the word IRAQ says "Here they go again. The same team that brought us endless war and heartache in Iraq is now threatening the same in Iran... We urge patriotic Americans to join us in calling on Congress to Stop President Bush from attacking Iran."
I ask you to resolve now to resolve to join us and do all you can to create a credible and hopefully irresistible demand for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their principal advisers. This will mean many hours of effective effort by each of us to secure votes for impeachment, persuade members of the House of Representatives to support and vote for impeachment and contributions and fund raising to wage a major nationwide campaign in the media, on the streets where we live and in the halls of Congress.
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