"WASHINGTON -- The indictment and resignation of I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby yesterday deprives the White House of one of its most influential national security thinkers, a powerful advocate for some of the Bush administration's most far-reaching foreign policy decisions since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
His pending legal battle, however, could also bring new scrutiny to the actions of the close-knit group of officials, many of them his old friends and colleagues from previous Republican administrations, who had long agitated for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and who are accused of exaggerating the threat from Iraq to achieve their goal, according to current and former government officials and specialists.
As the point man in the seat of power for the so-called neoconservatives, Libby was perfectly suited to carry their message: In 1992, as a senior Pentagon official, he coauthored a secret military blueprint asserting that the United States must ''act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated" to protect its interests by force. The draft document was never approved, but had a key word -- ''preempt" -- that became synonymous with a more aggressive, unilateral US foreign policy.
A decade later, as chief of staff and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser, Libby persuaded President Bush and Cheney, his boss, to adopt a strategy of preemptive war in Iraq, arguing inside the White House on behalf of like-minded allies such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, and former undersecretary of state John Bolton. Feith has left government service, Wolfowitz is now head of the World Bank, and Bolton is the US ambassador to the United Nations.
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