Could Mr.
Bush Become President for Life?
By Siddique Malik
Louisville, KY
smalik94@hotmail.com
Thanks
to America’s visionary founding fathers
and over two centuries of political evolution
in the country, America’s democratic institutions
are strong and assertive. If this was not the
case, considering President Bush’s predisposition,
he would have declared himself president for life
or until Osama bin-Laden was captured. His minions
would have supported the move, and the previous
Republican-led Congress would have acquiesced.
Most Democratic legislators would have jumped
on the custom-made “patriotism” bandwagon,
because of their general intellectual cowardice.
Those who opposed the move would have been labeled
as traitors and sent to Camp Gitmo for the crime
of “comforting and emboldening the enemy”.
This is how tyrannies are formed.
This article is not a comic exercise. Tragically,
incidents of the kind mentioned above transpire
unabashedly in countries in which democracy is
an alien concept or is permanently rudimentary.
One-man rule is the order of the day, hence the
never-ending misery of their unfortunate people.
In Pakistan, the script is well known. The army
chief seizes power by abducting the elected prime
minister and declaring himself the head of the
government. The prime minister’s party takes
the matter to the Supreme Court but the justices
always uphold the military coup under a contumacious
concept, “the doctrine of necessity”.
During the hearings, army keeps the justices under
strict observation and if there is even a hint
of any justice’s potential “rebellion”,
he is replaced by a lackey. Obviously, Pakistani
army generals don’t carry the traits of
General George Washington and his contemporaries.
Since assuming power in Zimbabwe in 1980, at the
end of the war of independence which he led, President
Robert Mugabe degenerated from being a world-acclaimed
freedom fighter to being a typical Third World
power-hungry dictator. Instead of cultivating
institutions of democracy in free Zimbabwe, he
consolidated his powers. He became a poster boy
for the aphorism: “Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely”. During the campaign
for the March 2002 presidential elections in Zimbabwe,
Mugabe issued a decree that made it illegal to
criticize the president. Of course, the reason
was “national security”. Obviously,
Mugabe did not belong to the league of founding
fathers that America had.
The world’s dictators have many common traits.
They use scare tactics and claim to be the messiah
(which they certainly are not) who will avert
the doomsday. The only objective of all their
actions is to enhance and prolong their power.
They often invoke and exploit religion. The concept
of accountability is an anathema to them, and
they are intellectually insecure. They believe
that their ideas constitute the only viable, suitable
and proper course of action.
Do leaders of democratic countries carry these
weaknesses, too? Yes, they do. However, their
countries’ democratic institutions prevent
them from pursuing self-aggrandizement with impunity,
and thus the rule of law prevails.
On October 16, 1970, in response to two political
kidnappings in the Canadian province of Quebec,
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War
Measures Act (synonymous with martial law), attributing
this drastic step to the need to protect “the
unity and freedom of Canada”. The mayor
of the city of Vancouver, 3000 miles to the west
and with no law and order issues, used these powers
to order the police to seize men with long hair
and give them forced haircuts, because of his
personal dislike of long hair on men. It proves
that unchecked power will be abused, even when
instituted for a so-called “noble”
cause. On June 26, 1975, fearing defeat in the
approaching elections in India, Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi declared a country-wide state of
emergency to foil what she said was a conspiracy
to destroy public interest. She banned political
activities and instituted a rule by decree. Then,
she used the emergency powers to incarcerate her
opponents. On November 11, 1975, citing political
stalemate, Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General
of Australia, in a dubious move triggered by personal
feelings, dismissed the democratically elected
government of Prime Minster Gough Whitlam.
However, strong democratic institutions in all
these situations fought back and consequences
of these aberrant acts were rectified. Even Bill
Clinton must have wanted to fire the Whitewater
independent counsel Kenneth Starr, but Clinton
understood that he couldn’t do it. Richard
Nixon had encountered heavy political fallout
by firing the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald
Cox, and this must have made Clinton’s decision
easy. Those who fathom history are saved from
making mistakes made, earlier, by others.
America is passing through a crucial time. President
Bush is bent upon undermining the concepts of
checks and balances, due process and accountability,
mechanisms which distinguish democracies from
tyrannies.
Since President Bush uses signing statements,
excessively, he thinks his words and wishes should
have the force of law. He is monitoring electronic
communications without judicial oversight, while
FISA courts established for this specific purpose,
exist. He pressurized the Congress to create “special”
trial procedures and courts. He once said that
as long as he occupied the White House, America
would not withdraw from Iraq. Would it not have
been appropriate, if he had presented a strategy
to win in Iraq, rather than talk like an unruly
child?
Pakistan’s “doctrine of necessity”
works like this: If someone in a powerful position
takes an illegal and unconstitutional action,
it should be considered legal and constitutional.
Bad for George W. Bush and Good for America that
the justices of the American Supreme Court were
not trained in Pakistan. Also, I cannot thank
God enough for keeping our founding fathers clear
of the GWB mentality. Can you imagine if GWB was
one of America’s founding fathers? One Zimbabwean
dispensation is too much.
The constitution has struck back. The tide on
which President Bush rode for over six years has
turned, and the Congress now generally refuses
to be bullied by a president whose main skill
is to repeat the names of the world’s criminals
and terrorists. Furthermore, the president’s
term is in its “last throes”. America’s
democracy would survive, bruised but intact; bruises
would heal. Here is one more reason to admire
our Constitution: It enshrines the term limit.
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