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supplied Saddam Hussein with large amounts of money, weapons technology, training, military intelligence, and even nuclear components. The iconic photograph of Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, smiling and shaking hands with Saddam in 1985 captured the essence of Iraqgate: the highest-level Reagan and Bush officials unlawfully supporting a regime that had, only a few years before, headlined the U.S. list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” (Indeed, when officials in the Bush 43 administration spent all of 2002 and early 2003 beating the drums for war against Iraq, they frequently cited atrocities such as Saddam’s “gassing of his own people”—atrocities perpetrated during the very period when Reagan and Bush 41 were illegally building up Saddam’s military and financial strength and concealing his crimes. Another result of the U.S. support for the Iraqi dictator during the 1980s, of course, was that a stronger and emboldened Saddam soon decided to invade Kuwait.)
    But as soon as Clinton was safely elected president, he quickly took steps to suppress any real inquiries into Iraqgate, invoking the same reasoning that had been used to justify the pardons of Nixon and the Iran-Contra criminals. In November 1993, when some establishment journalists still took seriously their role as adversarial checks on those in power, the Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory excoriated the new president for his role in blocking accountability.
    During the campaign, Bill Clinton indignantly promised to get to the bottom of [Iraqgate]. But a deep incuriosity has set in, and so far his Justice Department has accepted the finding of an in-house whitewash headed by retired judge Frederick Lacey. Attorney General Janet Reno has indicated she will make an investigation of her own. But who would take seriously any probe that Justice might make of its own outrageous behavior?
The president, it is said, wants to forget yesterday and concentrate on tomorrow, because he needs the help of Republicans in Congress. But truth has its uses in a republic, and is especially beneficial to presidents who may be contemplating loony and illicit foreign policies, as Bush did, even with Iran-contra fresh in his mind.
     
    McGrory’s protests fell on deaf ears. By then, the proclamation that we must “forget yesterday and concentrate on tomorrow” was ingrained Beltway orthodoxy.
    Aberrations Quickly Fixed
     
    On one occasion during the Bush 43 years, elite immunity did seem to suffer an exceedingly rare setback. On March 6, 2007, a unanimous federal jury found Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, guilty of four of the five felonies for which he had been indicted. Libby was convicted of two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice, and one count of making a false statement, all of which arose from the lies he told to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the grand jury as they were investigating the “outing” by Bush officials of CIA operative Valerie Plame. (He was acquitted on another count of making a false statement.)
    Libby’s importance in the Bush administration went far beyond his title. He had long been one of the most well-connected politicians in the country. Along with Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and Norman Podhoretz, he was one of the twenty-five signatories to the 1997 founding statement of Bill Kristol’s pro-imperial Project for a New American Century, which had called for an invasion of Iraq more than four years before the 9/11 attacks. Scooter Libby was at the very apex of the neoconservative movement that dominated Washington during the Bush 43 years, a top Bush aide and close intimate of America’s most powerful political and media figures.
    But with the announcement of the verdict, Dick Cheney’s leading adviser became a convicted felon. This rare triumph for equality before the law could not have happened but for