| By the Grace of Bush

Le Monde Editorial
Thursday 05 July 2007
George W. Bush is no ingrate. Even though he has always professed that offenders must be punished by the courts with the greatest possible severity, he has just granted his "clemency" to a close collaborator of his vice president. That person had been sentenced to thirty months in prison for obstruction of justice, false statements and perjury. It's true that the individual in question is not just anybody. He's I. Lewis - a k a "Scooter" - Libby, Dick Cheney's former chief of staff and a hard-core neoconservative who played a role in American policy against Saddam Hussein and in favor of the invasion of Iraq.
And it's precisely the war in Iraq that is the source of his legal troubles. Scooter Libby was accused of having leaked to the press, against all rules of prudence, the name of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame-Wilson. He wanted thus to punish her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, whose principal fault was to have cast doubt on the arguments advanced by Team Bush to justify the Iraqi adventure. Interrogated by the police, Mr. Libby lied to FBI agents, then to a grand jury - undoubtedly to protect his boss.
"Clemency" is not "pardon." Mr. Bush deemed the prison sentence "excessive," but he did not release the convict from the $250,000 fine he must pay. Mr. Bush was nonetheless hotly criticized by the Democratic majority in Congress for his "arrogance" and his propensity to place himself above the laws. If the president did not exceed his powers in this instance, he had not, up until now, made inordinate use of his right to pardon.
This case is exemplary. Lewis Libby was a faithful executor of a policy that failed. By sparing him prison, Mr. Bush seems to seek to symbolically save his whole Iraq policy from shipwreck. To allow Libby to be imprisoned would have been to admit that the Iraq policy was based on lies.
Mr. Bush's popularity is at its lowest point, at historic records for any American president, with the possible exception of Richard Nixon at the moment of the Watergate scandal. But he seems to care less. He has eighteen more months in the White House and cannot run again. Consequently, he feels free to do as he likes, without worrying about any sarcasm. All the more so as he is convinced history will vindicate him.
By flying to the aid of Scooter Libby, he pleases all his neoconservative friends, from among whom he drew the arguments for his crusade for democracy in the Middle East - the first stage of which was to have been Iraq. The time is not yet for piercing revisions. Certain of his own right, Mr. Bush sees no contradiction between flouting a legal decision that targets one of his intimates and the legal desert he maintains around the Guantanamo detainees.
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