WHY WAS SCOOTER LIBBY SO LOW UNDER THE RADAR…?
1456 by Jeff Hess
I”m not finished reading The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy (I expect to do so by Sunday), but my reading over the last two days prompts me to note the role of neocon I. Lewis Scooter Libby in selling the war. I confess that I had no idea how much power Libby wielded in the White House.
Mearsheimer and Walt mention Libby nine times in their book.
“Neoconservatives occupy influential positions at a variety of organizations and institutions. Prominent neoconservatives include former and present policy makers like Elliot Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the late Jane Kirkpatrick, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby… p. 129
“The problem is even more pronounced in the second Bush administration, whose ranks have included staunchly pro-Israel neoconservatives like Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Aaron Friedberg, John Hannah, I. Lewis Libby… p. 166
The driving force behind the Iraq was a small band of neoconservatives who had long favored the energetic use of American power to reshape critical area of the world. They had advocated toppling Saddam since the mid-1990s and believed this step would benefit the United States and Israel alike.
This group included prominent officials in the Bush administration such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the number two and three civilians in the Pentagon; Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and James Woolsey, members of the influential Defense Policy Board; Scooter Libby, the vice president”s chief of staff… p. 238-9
Regarding Libby, The Forward reported when he left the White House in the fall of 2005 that Israeli officials liked Libby. They described him as an important contact who was accessible, genuinely interested in Israel-related issues and very sympathetic to their cause. p. 240
The neoconservatives – most notably Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis – played a critical role in persuading the president and vice president to favor war. For them 9/11 was the new context to sell their old view of American foreign policy. p. 246
But surely the most important influence on the vice president was his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who was one of the most powerful individuals in the administration and whose views on Iraq were similar to those of his close friend and longtime mentor, Paul Wolfowitz. p. 246
“Woodward succinctly describes Libby”s influence in Plan of Attack (48-9): “Libby had three formal titles. He was chief of staff to Vice President Cheney; he was also national security adviser to the vice president; and he was finally an assistant to President Bush.
It was a trifecta of positions probably never held before by a single person. Scooter was a power center unto himself… Libby was one of only two people who were not principals to attend the National Security Council meetings with the president and the separate principals meetings chaired by Rice.” p. 433n105 to p. 246
Shortly after 9/11, the New York Times reported that “some senior administration officials, led by Paul D. Wolfowitz… and I. Lewis Libby… are pressing for the earliest and broadest military campaign against not only the Osama bin Laden network in Afghanistan, but also against other suspected terrorist bases in Iraq and in Lebanon”s Bekka region. p. 246-7
A key part of the public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq was the manipulation of intelligence information in order to make Saddam look like an imminent threat. Scooter Libby was an important player in this endeavor, visiting the CIA several times to pressure analysts to find evidence that would make the case for war.
He also helped prepare a detailed briefing on the Iraq threat in early 2003 that was pushed on Colin Powell, who was then preparing his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. According to Bob Woodward, Powell”s deputy, Richard Armitage, was appalled at what he considered overreaching and hyperbole.
Libby was drawing only the worst conclusions from fragments and silky threads. Although Powell discarded Libby”s most outlandish claims, his UN presentation was still riddled with errors, as Powell now acknowledges. p. 250-1
As I near the end of the book I’m finding it less and less an indictment of the Israel Lobby and more an attack on neoconservatism and how its followers bent the Israel Lobby to their needs.
And it also sheds an interesting light on this conversation.
I wonder now if the authors actually wanted to write a book about neoconservatism, but realized that a book on that subject would hardly raise an eyebrow and be most unlikely to inspire anyone to read such a dry topic.
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is 
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: 
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. 
