A Soldier By Any Other Name

Some things just make your blood boil. There have been many things like that recently for me. But none so much as the op-ed article wrtitten by Fouad Ajami for Friday's Wall Street Journal. I will let Mr. Ajami's words speak for themselves:


"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.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics.
.....snip......
He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own."


What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Wow, this Fouad Ajami guy must be some kind of dedicated American soldier, with a heroic record of bravery, to have the cojones to make this statement right? Eh, not so much. Fouad Ajami is a native of Lebanon who has lived in the United States since 1963. Never so much as been a bugle boy in a ROTC squad. He's got zip for military service; but he is very fond of war, as long as it is not him, his friends, or their families fighting in it. Who are his friends? You need not have asked. They are, of course, Wolfowitz (a mentor of sorts), Cheney, Candiliar Rice, Kristol, the fine citizens at the Council of Foreign Relations, and every other leading neocon in sight. There is not a freaking one of them that has ever been in a uniform or seen a drop of blood shed for their follies. This sick little prick needs to be sent back home to Lebanon immediately. There, he should be able to view first hand the war ravaged handiwork of minds like his.

Numerous other writers have already noted the absurdity of Ajami's incendiary comments about Libby when juxtaposed against the real American soldiers dying and being maimed by the thousands for this charlatan's frivolity, and that is so true. But there is another soldier that has fallen casualty to the neocon's war of belligerent choice. The soldier taken out of service to her country by Libby, and the treasonous conduct which he ended up in the dock for in the first place. Valerie Plame Wilson, a woman who spent over twenty years serving her country in the clandestine division of the CIA, nearly a third of which was overseas and undercover. A woman who was the leader of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction anti-proliferation group in the CIA at the time she was heinously outed by cowards like Libby, Cheney and Ajami. If my thin blood is boiling, Valerie Plame Wilson's must be running like double habernero hot sauce.

The real soldiers lost as a result of the Iraq war don't mean a tinker's damn to the neocon cowards, nor do their death and destruction, but the thought of poor pasty little Scooter serving a couple of years in Club Fed before returning to his life of leisure and wealth, now that gets their panties all twisted. I am going to end this article with the dead on accurate thoughts of of a fellow commenter at The Next Hurrah, JGabriel, because I could not possibly say it better:

"Well, if Libby is a 'soldier' in the war (in Iraq? on Terror? against Liberals?), then so was Valerie Wilson.

Which means Libby isn't so much the 'fallen' soldier as he is the one who stabbed a fellow soldier in the back, left her bleeding on the ground, and posted a sign next to her saying 'Desecrate This U.S. Corpse'.

With that reasoning in mind, Libby should be court-martialed, at the very least."