My two-cents on the Libby affair

Let us remember that the bruhaha over "Scooter" Libby began over the attempt of the Bush administration to protect the lie that justified the attack on Saddam Hussein. Hussein was never involved in the 9/11 attack; he was not stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; he was not seeking "yellow-cake" from Africa in order to develop a nuclear weapon -- all claims made by the administration in order to justify a war that many of the neocons had wanted to start even before Bush was elected the first time [See Project for the Twenty-First Century]. Libby's deception was but one small feature of the broader project to mislead the American people. He thus took the rap for the rest. In fact, his guilt for misstating the truth was in a sense not his but theirs -- the President, the Vice-President, Rumsfeld and all the rest -- for he was but following orders. So I feel for him -- again, he was the small fry who took the rap while the big fish got away Scott free. So all the talk about how minor his infraction was should not be allowed to conceal the real issue: the deliberate deception by the Bush administration to start a war that was never necessary and was, in fact, a digression from the war that should have been pursued relentlessly (in Afghanistan against Osama Bin Laden). Not only Libby, but all of us will be paying for that deception for generations to come.