In glibly talking about the necessary withdrawal of American soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen from Iraq, Democratic presidential candidates are refraining from speaking directly about the faults of U.S. foreign policy and the presumed plenary power of the post modern president to wield an imperial scepter around the world. While, on one hand, calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama maintain that some troops, thousands of them, should remain in Iraq and, generally, in the Middle East to enforce U.S, foreign policy. This, probably, also means their support for the establishing permanent U.S. military bases throughout Iraq. Obama has gone as far as to advocate invading Pakistan. This is certainly not a constitutional approach to campaigning for the office of U.S. chief executive, that is, if these candidates' ultimate motive is to maintain, and, if possible, increase, the current level of illicit power exercised by the U.S. executive branch.
Numerous federal officers, and a few motion pictures, have referred to the American president as the most powerful person on earth. This is, however, not true. The Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Executive Branch are essentially coequal in power. The only greater powers presently wielded by the President, other than those conferred upon the Executive Branch by the U.S. Constitution, are those which have been wrongly relinquished by Congress and delegated illegally to the Executive Branch without amending the Constitution to make such relinquishment legal. The decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold such unconstitutional delegation of authority have added pseudo-credibility to the process.
If New York's Hillary Clinton, Ohio's Barack Obama, South Carolina's John Edwards, or the other Democratic candidates are to embrace the purely constitutional role of the Executive Branch, in which Article 2 executive power is vested only in a President of the United States, they must renounce the imperial foreign policy agenda which has been pursued by every President since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Recently, I had an email conversation with retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to former Secretary of State Colen Powell, in which Wilkerson spoke candidly of his personal view on the capacity of the President to conspiratorially plan and execute illegal crimes against the people of the United States and the U.S. Constitution. He said, "Power management at the level of the presidency of the world's most powerful nation is hardly reducible to naïve theories of (criminal) conspiracy, however much satisfaction such theorizing may give to uninformed minds."
Wilkerson is publicly free with his use of the word "cabal" in describing the "Bush-Cheney Cabal" that has been in power since before 9/11. He has gone on record to say, on national television, that "A 'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' ran U.S. foreign policy for a president not versed in international relations and not too much interested."
The "Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary" defines cabal as a conspiratorial group of plotters, or a secret plot or scheme. Yet, he deigns calling a cabal a conspiracy, which puzzles me about Wilkerson's greater regard for political correctness than the naked truth. I perceive Wilkerson as a prime example of the "supposedly" educated professional career soldier who has "supposedly" studied government independent of personal bias in order to arrive at such conclusion about presidential arrogance. This is, perhaps, the basis for his, rather, colored perception of Richard M. Nixon and Watergate. In his apologetic email, decrying my use of the word conspiracy, suggesting deliberate executive branch involvement in the WTC and Pentagon bombings on 9/11, he said,
"What I have learned that is applicable here is that arguments such as those you espouse do not leave room for rational debate. Watergate was as much incompetence as conspiracy; Iran-Contra (Oliver North lying to Congress and Ronald Reagon's denied complicity) could well be construed as an executive branch reaction to an overreach in legislative oversight; the Mexican War, was, as you say, based upon farcical (absurd) evidence - but very well supported by the American people (one of the reasons Lincoln lost his House seat), and was anything but a conspiracy unless you conclude in that conspiracy the bulk of the people who were clearly complicit; and Vietnam was a tortured process of utter incompetence, lies, deceit, and subterfuge played out over a number years (14) with conspiratorial overtone."
Wilkerson represents himself as an authority on U.S. political history, but has failed to realize that American historians, since 1975, have attributed the Mexican War of 1846 to an almost single cause, the political hubris, expansionist mandate, and illegally covert executive actions of President James Polk. Letters, memos, and diaries of General, and later President, Zachary Taylor, cabinet officers under Polk, and the papers of Polk, himself, recount the conspiracy between Polk and Taylor to create a war with Mexico. Polk's personal mandate to increase the size of the United States, by taking from Mexico, by any expeditious means available, the great amount of land which was ceded by Mexico to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was the motivation behind the conspiracy that took the lives of nearly 2,000 American soldiers and marines.
When Taylor was summoned to the White House, in February of 1846, he was ordered by Polk to create a war with Mexico. And much like the traditionally accepted U.S historical perception of the behavior of the legendary Davy Crockett, at the Alamo, that he died in the 1836 battle swinging his flint-lock rifle, Old Betsy, the historical perception that the Mexicans started the fray, in April 1846, which led to an attack on U.S. Cavalry forces by the Mexican Army, had been supported by American historians until the honest Mexican account was studied. It seems that, according to numerous journals of credible Mexican officers, Crockett hid from the Mexicans at the Alamo when he knew that, if caught, he would be killed. According to the accounts, after the battle he pretended to be a diplomatic tourist until he was discovered, captured, and shot by a Mexican firing squad.
It also appears, from credible Mexican accounts, that Zachary Taylor, and his heavily armed cavalry, went to the Rio Grande, built a fort on the side of the River claimed by the Mexican government, and on April 24, 1846, fired the first shots on a Mexican cavalry patrol, killing a cavalryman and forcing the Mexicans to return fire. The same account was recorded in numerous journals of Mexican soldiers who witnessed what actually happened. Taylor, however, returned and report to Congress that the Mexicans had drawn first-blood through attacking the American fort. James Polk then fostered a press propaganda blitz, which published the great lie before the American public, inciting public war frenzy, before he went before Congress to demand a declaration of war against Mexico. Hence, Wilkerson's claim that most of the American public were ignorantly in favor of the war was basically true. Had the people known the truth, they would have probably demanded Polk's impeachment. But the ends of conspiracy played out in favor of the conspirators, and a deadly war took the lives of over 12,000 men and women.
What I see as the bottom line, in Wilkerson's response, is a work of sophistic explanation, attempting to purport, in effect, that the average U.S. voter does not have the insight and intelligence to judge the power, and the acts wielded by, the standing U.S. President. While I do have a master's degree in political science, Wilkerson is contending that it basically requires advanced degrees, and years of federal government service, to be capable of rightly dividing presidential behavior as right or wrong, and truth from lies. Wilkerson is a good example of the Samuel P. Huntington model of the professional soldier, who poses as the fiery implementer of the foreign policy decisions of career politicians, at the expense of constitutional limitations. The oath that Wilkerson, and all other commissioned military officers, took contained a sworn duty to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Nowhere in that oath does it say that jeopardy to the Constitution is to be determined only by higher ranking officers, and that the singular duty of the sworn officer is to obey the dictates of that person's superior officers and the U.S. President. In a nutshell, if Polk, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Reagon, Clinton, and GHB could get away with deliberate conspiracy, through the efforts of the military and the intelligence communities, why wouldn't George W. Bush try to do the same as his predecessors? I believe that sad history clearly promotes the ends of rational debate, if the irrational person, denying the possibility of conspiracy, is willing to discuss the matter logically.
When a U.S. President goes behind the backs of Congress, and the American electorate, to secretly plot illegal schemes, and commit acts contrary to existing constitutional and federal law, such as unilaterally extending U.S. troops into police actions for imperial foreign policy purposes and establishing treaties and international agreements without the will of the people, that particular U.S. President has broken the law and should be punished. Thus, when one American GI is killed in an unnecessary military conflict perpetrated by an American President, I believe that President is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, if not premeditated murder. Such death is a regular result of the king-like type of power presently wielded by the executive branch, the power to invade sovereign nation-states merely to obtain and use their natural resources. The next President will inherit these unconstitutional powers unless the current Democratic candidates publicly express a sincere willingness to abrogate extra-constitutional executive power-grabbing.
Yet, Donald Sutherland, in his role as Speaker of the House in the television series "Commander in Chief," made a scripted statement that "a person who seeks the presidency is seeking ultimate power. It's all about having the power, and a person not wanting that supreme power should not be in the White House." This is a paraphrasing of the rehearsed line, but it contains a gigantic truth that cannot be denied. As I have said before in numerous essays, the "Federalist Papers," written by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, were all about restraints on the executive branch. The American colonists had already dealt with a tyrant-king, George III, in a bloody revolution, and they did not want to see another tyrant rise up in the form of a U.S. President. To exemplify this, the Article 1, Section 8 power of Congress "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces is not mentioned in Section II, which comprises the very narrow powers of the executive branch. If the framers had wanted to give the President the authority to control the movements of land and naval forces, isn't it reasonable to conclude that they would have listed that power in Article 2 instead of Article 1? Something very perturbing is the sad fact that since 2003, no member of Congress has even attempted to address on the House or Senate floor, the reasons behind Congress' relinquishment of its Article 1, Section 8 power to make rules for governing the military.
I can plainly see why 75 percent of the people of Vermont want to secede from the federal union of states. The government of the United States has been counter-productive to the welfare of it citizens for a long time. In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, which I memorized as young child, several national objectives are succinctly mentioned. First, the establishing of justice, Second, insuring domestic tranquility, Third, providing for the common defense (not offense), Fourth, promoting the general welfare, and Fifth, the insuring of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. No mention is made in the Preamble of a foreign policy agenda, which would take trillions of dollars of tax money to maintain. It would seem that the Framers were much more concerned with what would transpire domestically among the people of the United States, than what would transpire outside the country. The American republic did not begin, in 1789, with an imperial agenda. A fledgling American republican form of government was morphed and mutated into such a distorted regime. Shouldn't those individuals aspiring to the office of President, rather, emulate the goals and aspirations of those who designed and wrote the glorious U.S. Constitution? I should think so.
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