I have to admit that Scooter Libby’s supporters are relentless. And I am beginning to get a better sense for why they are so keen to see Libby avoid jail time. Fouad Ajami pleads Libby’s case in today’s Wall Street Journal. As I was reading Ajami’s reasoning it occurred to me that these neo-cons see the prosecution of Libby in much the same way as I saw the Paula Jones case. The Jones case was so frivolous that I didn’t really care that it eventually caught Bill Clinton in a perjury trap. They never should have been investigating Clinton’s sex life in the first place. There were times when I teetered towards feeling that Clinton should resign, but then I always came back to the idea that a resignation would vindicate the strategy of using civil courts to hound a sitting president.
I think that is what these neo-cons think in the case of Libby. Here is how Ajami puts it.
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy…A war raged in the inner councils of your administration. The Department of State and the CIA let it be known that they were on the side of the angels, that they harbored great doubts about this expedition into Iraq, that they were “multilateralists” at heart…At the beginning of this ordeal, it would have been the proper thing to acknowledge that this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict.
In other words, Scooter Libby took the side of the neo-cons in a administrative war against the CIA and the State Department. For the neo-cons, this war within the Beltway was every bit as important as the actual war in Iraq. And it deserves the same ethical standards:
In “The Soldier’s Creed,” there is a particularly compelling principle: “I will never leave a fallen comrade.” This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Think about that. Ajami is saying that Libby is a soldier for the neo-conservatives…soldiers that fought along side the President. The President can’t leave this man behind to be treated roughly by the enemy. The President has to ‘give heart to those who embark[ed] on a common mission’ of leading this country into war. But, who is the enemy here?
The enemy is the CIA…the State Department…the Justice Department, the ladies and gentlemen of the juries that worked on the Plame Affair…and, ultimately, the American people.
The Schadenfreude of your political detractors over the Libby verdict lays bare the essence of this case: an indictment of the Iraq war itself. The critics of the war shall grant you no reprieve if you let Scooter Libby do prison time. They will see his imprisonment as additional proof that this has been a war of folly from the outset.
Here we see the mentality that led to the intentional outing of Valerie Plame in the first place. She was CIA. She was on the wrong side in a war. Her husband was from State. He was on the wrong side in a war. And when her career was ruined and her family was endangered, they fought back. The CIA fought back. The Intelligence Community fought back. People at the State Department fought back. And, while they didn’t get justice, they did get little old Scooter Libby. Nailed him. Too the wall. Thirty months of jail. Libby was Bush’s soldier, along with Clifford May and Joe Lieberman and Bill Kristol and Fred Hiatt and Judy Miller and William Safire and Charles Krauthammer. How can Bush leave him in the hands of the enemy?
Is it any wonder that the administration reacted to the Plame Affair by gutting the CIA and politicizing the Justice Department? This has been a war from the beginning.
To the neo-cons, people like John Ashcroft, James Comey, Patrick Fitzgerald, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and Larry Wilkerson have all been disloyal. They had to be sidelined. Their organizations had to be brought under control. The illegal had to be deemed legal.
To them, Joe Wilson tried to make a criminal case out of a policy decision to preemptively invade a foreign nation on trumped up charges and phony intelligence. Whatever followed was illegitimate in the same way that Clinton’s perjury was illegitimate because it flowed from a baseless sexual harassment charge.
If you really see the decision to invade Iraq on a par with fooling around with interns, then maybe this all makes sense to you.
In one sense it is true that Scooter Libby has been singled out to take the fall for the crimes that led us into Iraq. And if you don’t think there were any crimes, then you probably don’t think justice is being served by punishing Libby as some kind of proxy for the real architects of the war.
But Scooter Libby made the decision to be the fall guy. He might expect a pardon. After all, his obstruction of justice protected higher-ups. But pardoning him will only cement in history that George W. Bush and the neo-cons waged a war on the American people and our system of laws. History will record that they waged a war on reason and decency and the truth and the constitution.
Perhaps unintentionally, Ajami makes it clear that THE PEOPLE need to capture more Scooter Libbys and put them behind bars. Because these people are our enemies, as they have known from the beginning.