Inside the Current Issue

From the Editor: "Scooter" Libby & the Relevance of Intellectuals to Contemporary American Political Life

Neo-con wonk and instigator I. Lewis Libby.

Sometimes I despair of intellectuals having any influence on American life. But the indictment of a so-called "White House aide" in the Valerie Plame case has proved me wrong once again. Right-wing intellectuals wield far more power then most of us at the GC would ever want to know about.

I should first say that I've never been a big fan of conspiracy theories. Mostly this is because I believe that the biggest conspiracies are already public knowledge: political elites start wars for geo-political gain, corporations kill for profits, and priests molest children. I knew all these things as an eight-year-old. So, just like Edgar Allan Poe's purloined letter, and Goebbels's big lie, sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it in plain sight.

When I first heard that a "White House aide" was to be indicted in the Plame case, I rolled my eyes and thought, "who's the new fall guy." Just as with Jessica Lynch and the Abu-Ghraib scandal, I waited for a flunky to take the fall for their boss. But instead it was I who almost fell out of his chair when I heard that the "aide" who'd been indicted was none other than I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby is one of the most important intellectuals in the world who you've never heard of.

If you read many online bios of Libby, you'll find mention of this long-time neo-con lawyer's involvement in a variety of scandals (and merely scandalous activities), such as being the lawyer for the corrupt billionaire financier Marc Rich. But what is rarely mentioned is how Libby helped forge the current agenda of global geo-political domination that the US is following, aided by the ruse of the 'War Against Terror.'

One of the main neo-cons, in 1992 Libby authored (with Paul Wolfowitz) the "Defense Policy Guidance" draft document. When leaked to the New York Times in 1992, Senator Joseph Biden described it in horror as a blueprint for "literally a Pax Americana." The document advised that US take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union to establish global hegemony as the lone superpower; to further this, it recommended that the US should establish a ring of military bases to ensure domination over Europe and Asia, and engage in a series of preemptive wars. US military intervention was to be a "constant fixture."

This document is the basis for the foreign policy agenda of the Bush administration. In fact, Dick Cheney (to whom Libby was the aide until his recent resignation) incorporated a large number of its recommendations into a National Security Strategy document released by the Pentagon in September 2002, making Libby's handiwork into official US foreign policy.

Along with William Kristol (son of the OG Trotkyist-turned-neocon Irving), Libby went on to help found the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. PNAC is a right-wing think-tank that promotes an aggressive, expansionist agenda of US military and economic dominance of the world. Its moment arrived when G.W. Bush came to power. Bush has always been a blessed moron, sleepwalking his way to the very of top of the corridors of power: bereft of ideas himself, he is essentially an empty vessel. Like a skilled prostitute, he is a receptacle for the power-lusts of others. He is a tool they can pick up and use.

Lacking his own vision, Bush essentially inserted PNAC into the White House. The best known members of this group are Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense-turned-World Bank Chairman Paul Wolfowitz (Libby's former professor at Yale), and UN Ambassador John Bolton. At least a dozen other PNAC members hold less visible posts in the administration. Its 1997 founding statement is even a restatement of 1992 document Libby co-wrote, which later became the core the 2002 National Security Strategy official policy document. (These documents are all available at http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ govt/1992draft.php)

Libby aggressively pressed Colin Powell to include a variety of false evidence in his speech to the UN to justify the invasion of Iraq. In 2002 he was one of many administration officials who visited CIA headquarters in order to pressure analysts into tailoring their conclusions to fit the Bush/PNAC policy goals. (The CIA was then warning that there was no credible evidence that Hussein either had WMDs or ties to Al-Qaeda, and that an invasion would result in a quagmire and possibly protracted guerrilla warfare. Go figure).

When, in 2002, former Ambassador Joe Wilson went to Niger investigate the claims of Hussein was trying to buy uranium, he told he CIA that they were "bogus and unrealistic." But Bush repeated these claims in his 2003 State of the Union speech, and Wilson responded by repeating his findings in the New York Times. Soon after, Bush administration members leaked information to the press outing Wilson's wife as an undercover C.I.A. agent, thereby destroying her career. (Judith Miller went to jail for refusing to reveal who told her Valerie Wilson's name). Now, Libby is under indictment - unfortunately, not for outing Plame, but at least for perjury related to the case.

One doesn't need to resort to conspiracy theory to appreciate moments like these: when us peons and proles get a glimpse into the dance of calcified power within the corridors of the elites. As far as I am concerned, the only real question here is: did they know who Libby was when they indicted him, or was this just a lucky hit?

The Advocate recommends that Libby be granted the immortality of Prometheus: we think he should spend the rest of eternity surrounded by the grieving parents of murdered Iraqi and American soldiers and civilians, who will carefully strip his flesh off in sections - but very slowly, so that as the old sections of his skin heal, new ones will be stripped off, and when the old ones heal, they can be removed once again.

This is the only way we could even attempt to create some parity for the deaths that his ideas have inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
-- Spencer Sunshine