If the scandals surrounding Lewis Libby teach us nothing else, we ought to realize that the government and its affairs have become far too convoluted and inscrutable to qualify as democratic. Consider the relationship between Libby’s “commuted” prison sentence and the conflict in Iraq. This criminal’s prospect for receiving a presidential pardon and its effect on the continuous bloodshed that concerned American protesters have so far been unable to circumscribe must not be underappreciated. The near-impermeable partition between policy makers and citizens is seldom so conspicuous or so caustic. If you cannot discern the interrelatedness of these issues, then you have unwittingly identified the problem.

As outside observers, we are limited in what we know, even in what we think we know. We have testimonies from which to draw conclusions, but these hardly constitute informed perspectives. They are only the reactions of a poorly resourced, politically downtrodden and marginalized public.

***presumably*** this whole fiasco began with Joe Wilson doing his job. He issued the reports that clarified (hopefully to everyone’s relief) that Iraq was not acquiring uranium yellowcake for manufacturing Weapons of Mass Destruction from Niger. While we don’t know what sense the administration actually made of his reports at that time, Wilson discovered later that his reports were part and parcel to the justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom, but to the contrary of their actual meaning. Going public, Wilson set the record straight by sharing, forthright, the truth of his findings: that he had uncovered no evidence of such exchanges between Niger and Iraq. This disclosure, devastating to the cause of the government war-mongers, sowed the seeds for executive retribution. The identity of Wilson’s wife, then CIA agent Valerie Plame, was revealed, her life put in danger as a means of political payback. This breach of protocol (and of law) led to much-needed investigations of this administration’s methods in the discharge of its office; these investigations spawned an extremely elaborate and conscience-destitute generation of interconnected lies and deceit, extreme even for American politics, with Lewis Libby possessing the most unfavorable involvement -to- insulation-from-justice ratio within the guilty bunch. After awaiting the restoration of justice for an inexcusably lengthy interval, the disposal of Lewis Libby appeared a sure albeit insufficient step toward equity, one that would hopefully lead to the exposure and prosecution of others responsible for the warrantless deaths of thousands of U.S. Service personnel and untold numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians.

And then this hope was dashed by a simple, obscene but unsurprising stroke of presidential impropriety that we should by now be used to.

The hard specifics and details of how Libby will escape justice are not presently clear, but the likelihood that he will never serve a day of his sentence or be involved in any formal process of implicating other criminals seems inescapably self-evident. This apparent dead end in the sprawling but contiguous chain that starts in the Iraq campaign’s initial pretexts and ends with the paralysis of investigative processes basically equates to the Iraq war’s unjustified continuance in the face of its unpopularity and illegality. For the exclusive and elitist political behaviors of these oligarchs whose contempt for democracy and the people’s will is as bitter as it is transparent, the soldiers in Iraq will continue to die. Until we demand Libby’s rightful place in prison, to be followed by all his bosses and associates, this is unlikely to change.