Liberals called it "Fitzmas." And it was a long time coming. But even though it took almost two years for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to make it down the chimney, it was worth the wait. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff of vice-president Dick Cheney, faces up to 30 years in prison and a fine of US$1.25 million if found guilty of lying over his role in leaking the identity of a covert CIA agent.
Meanwhile, the continuing investigation of US President George W. Bush's consigliere, Karl Rove, holds out the possibility of further charges against a more senior White House staff member.
In a week that saw Bush withdraw his Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, and that followed a week in which Tom DeLay, the Republican house leader, was arrested for money laundering and conspiracy, liberals were gorging themselves on a festival of alleged corruption, criminality and incompetence prepared and served by conservatives.
The extent to which these most recent developments have exposed the Bush administration's real agenda and modus operandi should be welcomed. But legal defeats for the right should not be mistaken as political victories for the liberal-left, which has yet to convince anyone that it represents a meaningful alternative.
There is a thin line between what we know to be true and what we can show to be undeniable. Whether it's Rodney King or Abu Ghraib, only with incontrovertible evidence does an assertion shift from a debating point to a reference point.
Fitzgerald's investigation crossed that line, laying out in clear detail the proof for some of the central criticisms the liberal-left has asserted about the Bush administration over the past five years.
First, that the case for the invasion of Iraq was built on a lie. This goes to the heart of the matter. Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent whose husband, the former ambassador Joseph Wilson, was sent on a CIA-sponsored trip to investigate whether Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons. Wilson concluded that this was unlikely but the claim ended up in Bush's state of the union address anyhow. When it came to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's supposed weapon's cache, the White House was not the victim of flawed intelligence. It was the willful perpetrator of known falsehood.
Second, that lie could only be sustained by discrediting those who dared to expose it. On July 6 two years ago, Wilson accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the case for war in an article in the New York Times. Libby sought to trash Wilson's credibility by telling reporters that Plame helped arrange her husband's trip, thus revealing her identity and sparking the investigation. It is a crime knowingly to divulge the identity of an undercover CIA operative.
For the team that stood a candidate whose wealthy connections ensured he never saw combat while rubbishing the actual war record of his opponent, Senator John Kerry, this was business as usual. Two days after Wilson's piece appeared a Pew poll showed that over the previous four months the number of US citizens who believed the military effort in Iraq was going very well had slumped form 61 percent to 23 percent; the number of those who thought it was not going well had rocketed from 4 percent to 21 percent.
Three months after Bush landed on the USS Lincoln emblazoned with its Mission Accomplished banner, both the message and the mission were tanking; it was time to shoot the messengers along with the Iraqis.
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