I think we can be confident that the high-level prosecutions will never happen, and I think that most here would agree that it isn't enough to quietly change people and policies (for an election cycle or two).
Neither attempting to prosecute nor ignoring the crimes and moving on can heal the US -- no more than prosecutions or denial could have healed South Africa.
I advocate what has succeeded in similar cases: a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (According to this Wikipedia article, Josh Marshall has already called for this).
From the page linked above:
A truth commission or truth and reconciliation commission is a commission tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government, in the hope of resolving conflict left over from the past. They are, under various names, occasionally set up by states emerging from periods of internal unrest, civil war, or dictatorship.
This seems to fit the case better than any alternative I know. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
- Jake
[1] If for no other reason (and there are plenty of other reasons) then because you can't de-Nixonify the US by imprisoning every criminal involved - that would leave them almost completely without civil servants. If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
By US law, however, international treaties are themselves US law, and so at least some international crimes are automatically domestic as well. Also, the broader purpose of truth and reconciliation is the transformative effect of making past horrors common knowledge, which brings people closer together by giving them a shared understanding of reality -- this cannot not guarantee harmony, but it lessens a cause for discord.
And if the process didn't include a promise of immunity for the top deciders, it would help build the political consensus necessary for prosecution, and that prosecution being seen as legitimate. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
