On June 8, Fouad Adjami, one of the very special people who wrote letters to Judge Reggie Walton urging leniency for Scooter Libby, wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal that had the beyond-camp headline "Fallen Soldier." The editorial itself was written as an open plea to President Bush to do whatever it took to make sure that Libby would suffer no consequences from having lied and obstructed justice. Adjami wrote, "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... Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq" In the month since those words were first published, the op-ed has been much circulated, and Adjami has caught some flack for them. This has, if anything, accelerated since the president made his decision that Libby would never suffer a moment's unhappiness or inconvenience over his crime but would instead get to dip into the multi-million dollar "legal defense" fund his buddies threw together for him and move with silken ease into his new life of receiving fat checks and thunderous applause for appearing at Republican dinners, neocon picnics and Fox News to-dos. On MSNBC the yesterday, David Schuster had Adjami on and basically had him for lunch.

But the objections to what Adjami wrote are based on a misunderstanding. A lot of people took his editorial as an attempt to elevate Libby by comparing him to the soldiers serving in Iraq. But if anything, Adjami was graciously elevating the soldiers by suggesting that they deserve to mentioned in the same breath as the people he recognizes as the true patriotic heroes of our time--the politicians and other gasbags who, like himself, decide what they're afraid of and send other people's sons and daughter to get themselves wracked up so that our heroes can sleep a little better at night. These brave men and women--the George W. Bushes, the Dick Cheneys, the Richard Perles. the Paul Wolfowitzes, the Lewis Libbys, and, yes, the Fouad Adjamis--enjoy the military rhetoric and delight in draping themselves in it. Most of them have never served in the military and, indeed, would respond to the suggestion that they might ever have done so by shitting themselves in dismay over the sheer effrontery. These are people who "respect" our men and women in uniform in the exact same way that the president "respects" a handful of losers who couldn't even get out of jury duty, much less their obligations to the Texas Air National Guard. The Bushes, the Cheneys, the neocon professors have seen what actual military service does to a person. It gives him perspective, makes him a spoilsport liable to poke holes in some beautifully shaped abstract theory. Tommy Franks thought that Douglas Feith was the stupidest guy on the face of the earth, and in terms of things like seeing what was in front of his face and accurately processing information, Franks wasn't far off, but of the two, who had the more fun using a country and its population as his own personal Tinkertoy, and which one caught a lot of grief from trying to actually fix the mess? And do you have any doubt that Feith is the one who sleeps like a baby? Even Andrew Sullivan, back in his pro-war incarnation, used to express bewilderment over people who claimed to care that American soldiers were dying, because what the hell else were they there for? In a report from a National Review cruise in the current The New Republic, Dinesh d'Souza is described as announcing that the Democratic Party is the party of losers and the Republican Party the party of winners, and in this equation, who do you suppose are the people who might get killed?

"Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq." Who is the "our" referred to here? The answer that immediately leaps to mind is that it can't be the American people as a whole. I do think that every single one of us, whether we oppose the war or not, ought to feel that is somehow ours, in the sense that we can't escape responsibility for it and can't help being partly complicit in what it's doing to us and the rest of the world. It's killing Americans, and Americans will inevitably be caught up in the explosion of anti-American feeling and terrorist violence that it has inspired and will continue to inspire; and no American ought to be able to stand apart from the degradation of America's standing in the world that it has brought about, or can be fully indifferent to the ways in which it has sped up the process by which our country grows weaker, less secure. But that can't be what Adjami is getting at; the word "soldier" seems meant to refer to those who are active in keeping the war going. But more to the point, it refers to those who were so vital in getting the war started in the first place. The American public as a whole has no place here, really. When the White House first started hinting, in the days after 9/11, that it thought that a quick war in Iraq would be fun and give everyone a pick-me-up, the pollsters jumped on it, and the results came back loud and clear: most Americans felt that, yeah, it would be fun to do Desert Storm again, but we've just had a real terrorist attack from a serious enemy, maybe it's time to grow up and stop using the military for easy ego boosts, we'd really rather you concentrated on wiping out the Taliban and destroying al-Qaeda and bringing the people who did this to justice, how about we just agree that you could have done it much better than your father? The White House had to spend more than a year pounding away--look, it'll be so quick and so much fun, and I really will do it so much better than daddy did and I can't wait to spring that on him at Thanksgiving, and hey, if you're so hung up al-Qaeda, mmmmmwell, NigeruraniumyellowcakesecretmeetingSaddamsupportsterrorism, what do you say? Eventually, after this vigorous softsoaping, most Americans seemed to say yes, but we have now reached a point where more Americans have been opposed to the war for longer than more Americans supported it, whether or not you factor in that initial year of test-marketing. Adjami credits Libby with something that he and his fellows see as far more heroic and noble than the tacky "war" overseas where people without tenure are running around and getting shot and blown up. He's talking about the war for the war--the public relations battle to get the war off the ground, to keep it seen as legitimate as the worms started crawling out, and finally, the ongoing battle to paint its creators and proponents in the best of all possible lights, a war that will be going on from now until whenever every one of us is dead.

It is by recognizing that the war to create the war and to protect the reputations of those who created it is the real noble cause that Adjami can call the smirking serial killer Lewis Libby "an honorable man." He couldn't do that if he were using the phrase as it was once used, meaning a man of good moral character who can be trusted; Adjami is using it in as it is currently used, to mean "He's on my side so I don't care if he set his mother on fire." This is how Adjami can say 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." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized." Nine years ago, some of us failed to get exorcised about Bill Clinton's lying about the workings of his genitals because we failed to see how either said workings or his lying about them had any impact on the workings of government, but I'm here to tell you, the man got a blow job. Libby lied about how government officials who might have been doing better things with their time conspired to cause pain to someone whose great crime was to tell the truth about one detail in which the White House arranged to talk us into war. There is no way to gloss over this in a way that does not make the White House officials look petty, disgusting, and committed to not just lying to get their way but actively opposed to truth itself. Which hasn't stopped many commentators from taking the tack that it was more morally repugnant for Joseph Wilson to tell the truth than it was for the White House to punish him for it, any more than it would ever give Adjami pause to casually refer to telling the truth and attempting to punish people for telling the truth as "a policy difference over the prosecution of the war."

If Adjami's little plea for mercy has stuck in the craw of many, it's because underneath its tear-stained surface is the full, seething ocean of contempt that the Bush people in general and the neocons in particular harbor for the American people, for everyone they depend on to put their little fantasy term papers into motion, and certainly for anyone who would hold them accountable for anything, as if they were goddamn commoners. It must strike them as unbelievably impertinent that circumstances have forced them to try and explain themselves now, or rather to come right out and point out to us thickies just how magnificent and above it all their kind are. They may actually lose some power now, but they'll always have each other, and can spend a jolly time in their dotage sitting around the think tanks, reading their latest papers aloud and complimenting each other on being brilliant enough to always agree with themselves. They'll go to their graves believing that they're the real heroes, the true patriots, and given that less than thirty percent of the country agree with them, I'd be happy to let them think what they want and leave it at that, if only the scaly bastards believed in democracy.

[x-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]