March 7, 2007
The Libby Verdict Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:20 PM EST Today’s New York Times editorial, “A Libby Verdict,” salutes the verdict, calling it “another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served,” and then asserts that “we also do not understand why the federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, chose to wage war with the news media in assembling his case, going so far as to jail a Times reporter, Judith Miller, for refusing to reveal the name of a confidential source.” The difficulty with these two sentences is that they seem to be logically contradictory. Libby was convicted because reporters testified. They were reluctant to do so, and seem to have testified because they finally preferred violating the confidentiality of a source to going to jail for contempt. It seems likely that Fitzgerald had to go to war with the news media—to use the somewhat hyperbolic image of the editorial—if he was to win his case, and he did win his case: He persuaded the jury that Libby had lied. The Times wants the end without the means, but we rarely get that choice in life. The Times editorial concludes that the trial testimony provided “some of the clearest evidence yet that this administration did not get duped by faulty intelligence; at the very least, it cherry-picked and hyped intelligence to justify the war.” The Washington Post editorial makes for an interesting contrast, pointing out that Mr. Wilson’s original charges have not been confirmed by the trial, and that a bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee has refuted a fair number of them: Wilson had not effectively debunked the evidence suggesting that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, he had not been sent by Cheney to Niger to investigate the matter, and his report had not circulated at the highest levels of the administration and then been ignored. The Post also notes that Wilson’s subsequent charge, that there was a conspiracy to leak Valerie Plame’s identity, was not confirmed at the trial either, and that the trial evidence shows that this charge is unlikely to be true. My sense is that the evidence of the trial is consistent with the hypothesis that the administration, in common with most other observers, had no doubt that Saddam Hussein had retained substantial quantities of “weapons of mass destruction,” most likely chemical weapons, in defiance of the armistice terms of the 1991 Gulf War, and was seeking to develop other WMD. We now know that the administration was mistaken. Because the administration was so sure it was right in a conviction it shared with many opponents of the war—for example, the French government—it recklessly put forward some pretty raw intelligence about Iraqi activities, seeking to prove something it “knew” to be true, which was that the Iraqis were in breach of the armistice agreement. The Iraqis, of course, were in breach—they had refused the inspectors access to the country—but they had not used that breach to attain any increased military capacities. There are a lot of lessons in this, but they are more subtle than the ones the Times seeks to draw. The administration did cherry-pick and hype intelligence, but it did so to persuade, not to deceive; its critics having set it a probably impossible task, to prove without inspections what only inspections could prove, and doubting the good faith of its critics, it was careless with the evidence in hand, supremely confident that the results of the war would prove the assumptions about Iraqi WMD. Suppose that the Iraqis really did have substantial reserves of nerve gas, or really had tried to buy uranium in Niger. Suppose, for that matter, that they had succeeded. All of the best arguments against the war—the extreme difficulty of creating a stable and democratic Iraq, the likelihood of significant strategic gains for Iran, etc.—would still remain. Now suppose that the administration had somehow created that stable and democratic Iraq, but its errors about WMD remained errors, and its cherry-picking of intelligence, and its hyping, had still been exposed. The odds of anyone caring too much about the intelligence failures and hyping seem low. There are many things to be said against the way the administration planned and conducted this war, but the more euphemistic version of “Bush lied, GIs died” is not one of them.
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