Conservatives Without Conscience

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff and national security adviser—and he was also an assistant to the president—is an überneoconservative, a personification of the true believer who has been involved with neoconservatism since its arrival in Washington during the Reagan administration. Libby is also an exemplary authoritarian.[*] Until he was indicted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald for perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice relating to the investigation of the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s covert status, Libby was relatively unknown, a “behind the throne” man with unique influence within the Bush/Cheney White House. Libby worked with Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under Bush I, and while at the Defense Department he assisted his former Yale professor Paul Wolfowitz in drafting a defense policy guidance paper calling for unilaterally preemptive wars and the invasion of Iraq—a decade before the 9/11 terror attacks. (When this highly controversial document was leaked to the press, Bush I had the policy withdrawn, assuring the world that this was not the way Americans were thinking.) Later Libby would help draft a report for the neoconservative Project for the New American Century entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses—Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century,” which was merely a restatement of the early policy paper, but under Bush II it became the blueprint for the administration’s defense policy.

Libby has been extremely aggressive in promoting the aims of neoconservatism. Reportedly:

It was Libby—along with Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and a handful of other top aides at the Pentagon and White House—who convinced the president that the U.S. should go to war in Iraq. It was Libby who pushed Cheney to publicly argue that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and 9/11. It was also Libby who prodded former Secretary of State Colin Powell to include specious reports about an alleged meeting between 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official in Powell’s February 2003 speech to the United Nations.[10]

This, of course, turned out to be extremely bad advice but typical of authoritarian aggression. Libby no doubt took whatever steps were necessary to further the cause he believed in, even pushing dubious information with great self-righteousness.

The skulduggery that led to Libby’s indictment is likewise characteristic of authoritarian behavior. Libby had sought to discredit the visit to Africa, by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to determine if Niger was supplying yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Bush and Cheney had been claiming that Iraq’s pursuit of uranium was evidence of their development of a nuclear capacity, thus providing a justification for a preemptive war. Wilson found the yellowcake report not true (in fact, it had been based on forged documents), and after the president made a contrary statement in his 2003 State of the Union address, Wilson publicly corrected the record. Libby was outraged and apparently believed that by claiming that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA operative involved in monitoring the proliferation of such weapons, had been involved in sending her husband to Niger, the trip would be perceived as some kind of boondoggle. In fact, she was not involved in the CIA’s decision to ask her husband to make the trip, but Libby leaked her covert identity to members of the news media anyway. Under some circumstances it is a violation of the law to reveal the covert status of CIA operatives, for it not only places the agents themselves in jeopardy, but also their contacts. Surely Libby knew this, given his long experience with national security. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigated her exposure, Libby gave FBI agents and the grand jury false statements about the newspeople to whom he had revealed her name. As Altemeyer’s work shows, authoritarians have little if any conscience when pursuing their causes, and reason gives way to expediency.