Libby takes the fall.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Obstruction of justice and perjury are serious crimes, and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was right to vigorously press his case against former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Yet when Libby's trial ended Tuesday with a verdict of guilty on four of five counts, it was plain that bigger fish had slipped the net.

Libby was a loyal servant who got caught up in lies while carrying out the orders of others. Those who gave the orders, those who set Libby on a course that could lead to prison, have faced no legal consequences. One of them is vice president of the United States.

Libby's trial was about a few minor brush strokes in a very big picture: the Bush administration's single-minded effort to build a case for war against Iraq. As part of this effort, the administration moved to discredit people who questioned important elements of the case.

Among them was Joseph Wilson IV, a former U.S. envoy to Iraq, who wrote in The New York Times that the CIA had sent him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire nuclear materials from the African nation. Wilson wrote that he found no evidence of this - yet in his 2003 State of the Union speech, President Bush accused Iraq of seeking uranium in Africa.

Wilson's account infuriated Vice President Dick Cheney, who prepared hand-written notes on how to counter the former ambassador's charges. Eight days after Wilson went public, columnist Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent. No one has been charged with leaking Plame's identity - indeed, the leak may not have been illegal. The primary source of the information was Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state. Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, also provided information to Novak.

It was lying, not leaking, that brought Libby down. The jury found that in the course of Fitzgerald's investigation Libby obstructed justice, made false statements to the FBI and lied to a grand jury. Libby's defense was that he had learned of Plame's identity from reporters, and any false testimony was the inadvertent result of a busy man's inability to remember the details of his schedule. But other busy men undermined that excuse - such as former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who testified that he had told Libby about Plame the day after Wilson's article was published.

The jury needed 10 days of deliberations to untangle the dispute over who told whom what and when. The verdict, however, upholds the uncomplicated principle that justice depends on people telling the truth under oath. If Libby had forthrightly described the attempt to discredit Wilson by giving the press a whiff of nepotism, and had hoped to deter further revelations by showing that critics and their families could expect repercussions, he'd still be Cheney's right-hand man.

That's why the Libby verdict is unsatisfying. The decision to invade Iraq bent history in a disastrous direction, and that decision was based on wishful thinking and a willful blindness to facts. The anti-Wilson project was a small part of a comprehensive campaign in which voices of caution were ignored or shouted down. The campaign even included the presidential declassification of documents for the purpose of planting stories with friendly reporters.

Libby was no more than a willing cog in that political machinery. Yet Libby alone faces the possibility of years in prison. A broader verdict on the effort to justify and defend the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq will have to come not from a jury, but from history.