Rising Hegemon
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it...
"Law & Order" is such a silly thing...as opposed to a talking point!
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.
This may be the most convoluted fucking paragraph in the history of man.
Pardon Scooter or the terrorists win...our precious war is bigger than the law...3,504 dead soldiers can't be wrong (even if their lives were left behind)...blah..blah...fuckin' blah.
Scooter Libby -- never an actual soldier (unless you count Phillips Academy a Yale prep-school).
Fuad Ajami --
A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction. The only thing that makes him worth reading is his prose style, and even that has suffered of late. As Ajami observed of Naipaul more than twenty years ago, "he has become more and more predictable, too, with serious cost to his great gift as a writer," blinded by the "assumption that only men who live in remote, dark places are 'denied a clear vision of the world.'" Like Naipaul, Ajami has forgotten that "darkness is not only there but here as well."
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