With 3,500 dead in the fast-descending hellfire of Iraq, there is one man the opinion-mongers on the right do not want to leave behind on that sacred battlefield: Scooter Libby. Yes folks, in a sickening rant that quite literally spits on the grunts doing the fighting and dying in George Bush's war, Journal guest columnist Fouad Ajami equates a paper-pushing perjurist with fallen American troops. The column is entitled "Fallen Soldier: Mr. President, do not leave this man behind," Ajami actually brings himself to type the following paragraph - and the Journal's editors, sniffing Murdoch several floors above their heads, actually bring themselves to post it:
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.
Ajami is one of the most politically influential Arab-American intellectuals of his generation, a confidant of Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relation. He was a war hawk, and clearly remains one. Dick Cheney cited his "expertise" in Middle Eastern affairs when he said in a famous 2002 speech that the streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans."
Like a lot of the conservative think-tankers who got us into this war, Ajami has no clue as to the blood and sacrifice of troops on the ground and their families back home. If he did, he could never have seriously written this sentence:
Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
This "casualty of war" metaphor is truly obscene. But then again, as Digby notes, the whole Beltway class seems quite crazed by Libby's downfall:
The entire "village" is beside themselves over this, in much the same way they worked themselves into a frenzy over Clinton's hallway trysts. It's that same phony, operatic fervor that leaves the rest of the country wondering what in the hell these people are smoking. Libby may be a friend, but these bilious paeans to his "goodness" and excusing his behavior from everyone from Joe Klein to Condi Rice is verging on bizarre.
In response to Ajami's truly bizarre column, one soldier wrote a stinging letter to the President of Johns Hopkins, where Ajami is employed. Read it here.
