Don’t Impeach Biden

In the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, calls to impeach Biden have been coming from everywhere. In the past few weeks "Impeach Biden," "President Harris," and "Biden Resign Now" have all trended on Twitter. Representative Lauren Boebert recently said in a press conference referencing the flaws in the withdrawal claiming "It is time for action, impeach Biden, impeach Kamala Harris, and throw in the secretary of state if you could get him back from vacation. Take a vote to vacate the chair to get Nancy Pelosi the heck out of here." She went on in a later interview to claim she is actively introducing legislation to do exactly that. This is an egregious mistake. The deaths that occurred as a result of how we withdrew are without a doubt a tragedy. They cannot be forgotten. Repercussions would not be wrong. However, impeachment in response to the one president who finally ended this absolutely atrocious war doesn’t serve to act as repercussions but rather sends a message to all future presidents: don’t mess with the empire.

As one can find here from the great Scott Horton:

"It was George W. Bush who refused to negotiate al Qaeda’s extradition. Bush then let Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri escape to Pakistan while he chose instead to focus on regime change in Kabul and later Baghdad. It was Bush who decided on the strategy of building and training up an Afghan National Army to secure the new regime in power and take the fight to its rivals. American officers with no one to fight, found and made enemies where there were none before. By 2004, the Taliban, whose surrender Bush had refused to accept, returned to insurgency against the occupation. Of course, the more the U.S. built up a new government and army, the more the people hated and resisted it. As they say about their enemies, the Americans only understand one thing, force, and when confronted with this resistance they only escalated again and again, killing more innocents and combatants alike, and driving even more people into the insurgency. The CIA, military and their proxies tortured people by the thousands for years. They routinely slaughtered civilians and wrote it off as ‘collateral damage.’"

Despite this, we never saw any impeachment of George W. Bush. He has countless more deaths on his hands than Biden’s botched withdrawal. The major difference was that the withdrawal was in the name of ending these deaths, whereas Bush’s actions were in the pursuit of death. And Bush is just the first of three who did not get impeached for their heinous war crimes. Next came Barrack Obama as Horton continues:

"When Obama ran for president in 2007 and 2008, he called Afghanistan the ‘right’ war in contrast to the massive error of Iraq War II. But he really only promised a small escalation of a couple brigades. The military, however, had other plans. His Bush-holdover secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and Central Command Chief, Gen. Petraeus, demanded that Obama send the general in charge of the Afghan war, Gen. David McKiernan home and replace him with the supposed strategic genius and push-up and jogging super-hero Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The trio then spent the better part of 2009 teaming up with hawkish senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the think tanks, especially the Democrats’ new Center for a New American Security, and the news media to pressure Obama into sending a total of 70,000 reinforcements in a so-called ‘surge.’ The added troops were to implement Petraeus and Marine General James Mattis’s rewritten counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) which they sold as a magic potion that would guarantee ‘success’ at winning over the hearts and minds of the good people of the southern Helmand and Kandahar provinces… As predicted, Obama’s Afghan ‘surge’ only drove more people into supporting and joining the insurgency. McChrystal’s ‘insurgent math’ explained why: for everyone they killed, they were recruiting 10 more into the ranks of the enemy."

Yet how is Obama remembered? The president without a scandal. Civilian hospitals and weddings and of course Edward Snowden may disagree with such a claim. He continued his predecessor’s evil wars and started new ones as well. He spread mass murder at a whole new level, but we saw no articles of impeachment brought against him for these war crimes because once again the empire protects its own.

However, his successor – Donald Trump – was a creature unprecedented in politics. He seemed to have little to no interest in the empire to the point that he even started the direction and negotiated the ceasefire that Biden continued to reach this point of withdrawal. However, this is not to say he’s anywhere even close to innocent in the world of war crimes. His management of Yemen was nothing better than either of his predecessors. In fact, at one point in 2017, Trump managed to drone Yemen more in one week than Obama in an entire year. And then, as late as his last week in office, we found Trump committing still further war crimes in Yemen. I wish I could say that we can finally rest assured knowing that impeachment trials were finally brought to one of these war criminals, but we all know that Trump’s two impeachment hearings were laughable and had nothing to do with the genocide that is occurring in Yemen under his watch but rather for overblown accusations of abuse of power, obstruction of congress, and incitement of insurrection. Very real war crimes were occurring, yet we watched congress engage in nothing but political theater.

Now we come to Biden. With his decades-long career in politics, there is no doubt he shares much of the blame of his predecessors and now he most definitely has blood on his hands from the mistakes during this withdrawal. As he said himself in a recent press conference, ultimately anything that occurs in this process rests on him. However, finally impeaching a president for war crimes after decades of very real evil because this president did a poor job of exiting a war, teaches all future presidents what is to be expected: do not cross the military-industrial complex. However, there is a much more positive way to ensure that these deaths did not occur in vain: leave Iraq, leave Yemen, just finally leave everywhere that we have no business being and do it right this time.

Connor Mortell graduated from Texas Christian University with a major in finance and a minor in Chinese. After graduation, he went on to work as a legislative aide for the Florida House of Representatives for two years. He then returned to school and is currently studying for his Master of Business Administration at Florida State University. Additionally, he is a graduate of Mises University where he passed the Mündliche Prüfung Viva Voce Exam on Economics. He can be contacted at connormmortell@gmail.com.