Fouad Ajami may find it compelling to call on President Bush to pardon I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for his loyal service as “a soldier in your–our–war in Iraq”, but I find it dangerous and intellectually immature. For example:
The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson’s identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.
It’s quite the conservative principle to pardon a guilty man so that we don’t feel bad about another guilty man being free. You know, since there’s no other solution. I’m unconvinced, and again find it dangerous, by the rhetoric that Libby “can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed [factual sic] as its own.”