Soldiers Of Fortune

It's bad enough that the craven assholes sharpening up their crayons to defend convicted felon and traitor Scooter Libby are couching their lame arguments in "Scooter's just a great family guy" pablum. As hurriedly as they rushed to proclaim Bill Clinton's lying to be an impeachable, unforgivable offense that trashed the integrity of their dirty little town and Duh Peepul's House, so they rush to defend a man who was indisputably at the nexus of a propaganda campaign to push through a tragically flawed, disastrous war. It's a Free Mumia movement for the appletini set of moneyed douchebags who continue to clog our sclerotic political system.

But here we have an atrocious metaphor, one proclaiming poor Scooter as a kind of Private Ryan of the new millennium. While American kids are still getting blown up, day after miserable day, in this scam that Scooter helped pull on his country, these fucktards have the goddamned nerve to talk about them in the same context.

This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.

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Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics.

Oh, indeed. I'm surprised the vast swaths of basement-bound war-bloggerses haven't taken this call-to-arms more to heart, and started demanding military discounts on Cheetos and Mountain Dew. Semper fi, 82nd Chairborne. Death before stale snacks.

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, but that they had lost the war to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the "hawks" around him. In the midst of this, Scooter Libby worked tirelessly and quietly to prosecute and explain and defend this war. He accepted the logic of the Iraq war, the great surprises we met in the course of this war.

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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.

Okay. And in what way, precisely, has this not been a war of complete folly, both tactically and strategically? Clearly Ajami's issue here is with the politically problematic situation of leaving Scooter in Club Fed sans pardon. The base, such as it is, might disntegrate, presumably resulting in demographic slivers of aimless rubes looking for another rake to step on, for example Mrs. Doubtfire Rudy Giuliani. Well, good luck with all that.

But let's note for the record that Ajami's moral cretinism lies in being more concerned with the bad form of all this unpleasantness, than maybe the simple fact that Libby's "acceptance" -- and, let's face it, covert propagation, to the point of purposefully outing public dissidents with explicit intent to defame and discredit -- of the "logic" of this war was disastrously flawed and intellectually corrupt from the very outset. That supposedly well-meaning people thought it would all turn out so much better does not bring back smithereened soldiers and children, does not reverse the bloodbath of trial by power-drill and gouged eyes, mutilated bodies and renewed grudges.

If you're not going to be man enough to just admit you were wrong -- wrong, tragically, horrifically fucking wrong -- and insist on the perpetrators of massive failures face at least some accountability, the least you can do is shut the hell up and not throw a diversion path of (p)rose petals to impede a tiny measure of recourse.

And again, to bring this forth as if a lackey called "Scooter" was some sort of noble warrior is nothing short of nauseating. It's a disservice to honest bureaucrats, not to mention actual military personnel. That there's some tasty kool-aid.

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. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration."

It's peculiar that Ajami would even bring this up, because it's far more incriminating of how the Bushies conducted themselves, than a vindication of their supposed good intentions. Bush could never have acknowledged anything of the sort that Ajami prescribes, because the marketing campaign explicitly dictated that as an existential crisis in the offing, nothing short of absolute solidarity on the issue would do. Has Ajami not fucking paid attention to four years of self-serving pronunciamentos and challenges to opponents' patriotism and good sense? Really, he ought to be ashamed for even trying to float that one.

As for reminding Bush of what he said about firing anyone found out to be involved with this, tell it to Karl Rove. Bush has been resolutely disingenuous about that statement ever since it saw daylight by crawling out of his lying piehole.