The Libby affair and the internal war.

• Author: Petras, James
• Position: Salvaging Democracy - Irving Lewis Libby

The national debate, which the indictment of Irving Lewis Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice has aroused in the mass media, has failed to address the most basic questions concerning the deep structural context which influenced his felonious behavior. The most superficial explanation was that Libby, by exposing Valerie Plame (a CIA employee), acted out of revenge to punish her husband Wilson for exposing the lies put forth by Bush about Iraq's "importation" of uranium from Niger.

Other journalists claim that Libby acted to cover up the fabrications to go to war. The assertion, however, raises a deeper question--who were the fabricators of war propaganda? Who was Libby protecting? Consider not only the "fabricators of war," but also the strategic planners, speech-makers, and architects of war who acted hand-in-hand with the propagandists and the journalists who disseminated the propaganda? What is the link between all these high-level functionaries, propagandists, and journalists?

Equally important, given the positions of power which this cabal occupied and the influence they exercised in the mass media as well as in designing strategic policy--what forces were engaged in bringing criminal charges against a key operative of the cabal?

Libby's rise to power was part and parcel of the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives to the summits of US policy making. Libby was a student, protege, and collaborator with Paul Wolfowitz for over 25 years. Libby, along with Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Kagan, Cohen, Rubin, Pollack, Chertoff, Fleisher, Kristol, Marc Grossman, Shumsky and a host of other political operators, were long-term believers and aggressive proponents of a virulently militaristic tendency of Zionism linked with the rightwing Likud Party of Israel.

Early in the 1980s, Wolfowitz and Feith were charged with passing confidential documents to Israel, the latter temporarily losing his security clearance.

The ideologues began their "Long March" through the institutions of the state, in some cases as advisers to rightwing pro-Israel congressmen, others in the lower levels of the Pentagon and State Department, in other cases as academics or leaders of conservative think tanks in Washington during the Reagan and Bush, Sr. regimes.

With the election of Bush in 2000, they moved into major strategic positions in the government as the principal ideologues and propagandists for a sequence of wars against Arab adversaries of the...