Bushco Keeps Trying To Tie Obama's Hands

As it prepares to crawl away from the world stage like the vermin they are, I find it amusing to watch acolytes of our ruling cabal now trying to give back the power to other branches of government that they claimed for themselves before Barack Obama is sworn in as our 44th president.

We have yet another example of that in the New York Times today in an opinion piece written by John (“Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran”) Bolton and former administration lawyer John (Torture) Yoo (of course, the very first problem is that these two were even given a forum by the Times; interesting how Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt will wrestle with other, more subtle issues of coverage than the basic question of why his newspaper provides a soapbox to two such rank liars and propagandists...or this, oddly enough).

Picking through the flotsam of phrases like “binding down American power and interests in a dense web of treaties and international bureaucracies.” “to subordinate (our) policies, foreign or domestic, to international control,” “the benignly labeled ‘global governance’ movement,” and “quixotic and impractical global governance regimes,” we find such “Oooga Booga!” scare language as the following…

Candidate Obama promised to “re-engage” and “work constructively within” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate?

I no more know the answer to that question than these two characters do. However, I just wanted to point out the following about the Kyoto Protocol (from this Time story dated June 2001)…

…the real significance of the revised Kyoto Accord lies less in its impact on the planet's climate than in the fact that it survived Washington's withdrawal. The determination of the nations of the industrialized world to hang in and negotiate a binding treaty even after it had been nixed by the "indispensable nation" suggests that we may have entered a new era in international affairs. And that it will be an era in which the U.S. will no longer be automatically granted the leadership role among Western nations it established during the Cold War.

By the way, I think the fact that we are no longer an “indispensible nation” in world affairs, as noted by the author, is another tragic Bushco legacy (and something else greatly ignored by our corporate media). Because we have chosen to cede any kind of ownership or even participation in a discussion concerning the most critical issues faced by this and other nations, others (notably China) have stepped into that void.

Continuing with the Time story…

The Clinton administration was never happy with the terms of Kyoto, but it kept its negotiators at the table to grind away at the original treaty. President Bush gambled that withdrawing from the negotiations — that is, removing the indispensable polluter — would force the international community back to the drawing board to seek an agreement more favorable to the U.S.'s gas-guzzling economy. But summary withdrawal from a decade-old process and failure at the same time to advance any alternative was read by the Europeans as a lack of seriousness. Indeed, there was spontaneous booing in the conference hall at Bonn when U.S. delegate Paula Dobriansky told the meeting, "The Bush administration takes the issue of climate change very seriously and we will not abdicate our responsibility." On global warming, the "indispensable nation" is looking rather more like a "rogue nation."

Also (back to Bolton/Yoo)…

In 2002, the administration considered submitting the Treaty of Moscow, a nuclear arms reduction agreement, for majority approval of Congress. Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, privately made clear that he would vigorously oppose such an attempt to evade the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives. The administration agreed to submit the agreement as a treaty, and the Moscow agreement cleared the Senate.

I don’t really have anything to say about that, but it’s funny to read Bolton pretending to defend the “Senate’s constitutional prerogatives” on the matter of approving a nuclear arms reduction agreement, when as noted here, Bolton and the rest of Bushco walked away from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that “bans all national missile defense” in pursuit of a “Star Wars” missile shield (the perpetual neocon pipe dream – the story by Michael O’Hanlon, of all people, was dated August 28, 2001; as we know all too well now, any talk of missile defense would disappear for years as a result of the events that transpired about two weeks later). Basically, Bolton/Yoo pretend to care about ratifying only the agreements that suit them and their handlers.

Returning to the Times Op-Ed…

President Bush, like President Clinton, did not sign a global agreement that would ban antipersonnel land mines, on the grounds that they are a key component of the American defense of South Korea. But his administration has pressed for ratification of the treaty on the law of the sea, which would subject disputes over the free passage of American naval vessels to the jurisdiction of an international maritime court — which the Senate has so far refused to ratify.

Bolton/Yoo just pushed one of my many buttons here, in particular on the matter of land mines used for the “defense” of South Korea; this tells us that…

Official U.S Army briefers in Korea have stated that the US has no responsibility for the frontline defense of South Korea.

Of the 1.2 million landmines stockpiled for use in Korea, nearly half are not even in that country, and plans call for turning all but 5% of the remaining half over to the South Koreans.

Seventy-five civilians have died from mine accidents in Korea since 1990, and the number of injuries is much higher.

It is estimated that there have been over 1,000 civilian mine victims since the end of the Korean War.

Many landmines stockpiled for use in Korea are non-self destructing or “dumb” antipersonnel landmines that can remain active for decades.

Basically, there’s no good reason for the continued existence of land mines, unless our government wants to kill, maim or cripple civilians. And though I’ll admit that I have more reading to do on the issue, I wonder why, with our economy in such a calamitous state, we even remain in South Korea at all (if the ROK can’t defend itself after we’ve maintained a presence for about 50 years, will we ever see that day in our lifetimes?).

Also, Bolton/Yoo are correct about the Senate’s failure to ratify UNCLOS, which has created an opportunity for our ol’ buddy Vlad Putin to do a lot more than poke his head over the border of Alaska (here), as Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin put it a few months ago.

It’s amusing, actually, to read Bolton and Yoo’s faux diplomatic musings here given the fact that Bushco is about to exit at long last. I, for one, would like to hear them (particularly Yoo) try to explain why Obama should not be conferred all of the “unitary executive” powers that they believed that Dubya possessed over his failed presidency. After all, aren’t we still “fighting the global war on Terra! Terra! Terra!”?

By the way, Dawn Johnsen, an Obama appointment to head the OLC, had some rather choice words for Yoo and Bushco lawyers in general, as Glenn Greenwald notes here (h/t Atrios).