Chalabi!

Convincing the admin that he had their best interests at heart

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

05/24/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/chalabi.htm

It’s easy to understand why Dick Cheney and all the other administration hawks are soft on crime. If they implemented crime fighting in the United States the way they conduct America’s foreign policy, they all would have been hanged as traitors by now.

Clear back at the beginning of last year, when the administration was making noises they might have to reluctantly invade Iraq (just as Dick Cheney’s and Richard Perle’s PNAC planned in 1998), Ahmed Chalabi was the natural choice to lead the post-war Iraq. His qualifications were that he had lived in Iraq as a young boy, and he wouldn’t mind going back and gutting the treasury.

Hell, if that’s all it takes, I’m going to ask Dick Cheney if I can be the next king of England. Dick, I promise that if you attack England, Londoners will be cheering and throwing flowers at American troops, and those peaches and cream-complected British girls will be spreading their legs for them. England hasn’t been invaded in nine hundred and thirty eight years, so obviously, they are overdue. Oh, and I promise to let Halliburton oversee rebuilding London after it’s been reduced to rubble.

Additionally, it will help you get reelected as vice President. Americans always support their leaders during time of war. There was even a movie about it: Wag the Dog.

Perle told George Stephanopoulos that America had "to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives . . . people like Ahmad Chalabi.." This led one of the Weasels to acidly observe, "Hmmm... a ‘silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guy’ who embezzles money from banks...I'm sure Bush thought he was like family!"

He certainly shared Perle’s values and objectives, didn’t he?

Iran, in a formal statement, said, "We had continuous and permanent dialogue with Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi Governing Council, but spying charges are unfounded and baseless. It's not true at all."

OK, America has executed accused traitors on less than that.

The trouble is, this is coming out of Iraq, and as with most things, it’s nearly impossible to tell, as Heinlein put it, "who is doing what to whom, and who got paid."

The US raided Chalabi’s home, claiming that they had rock-solid evidence that Chalabi had been working in cahoots with Iran into tricking the US into toppling the Saddam regime.

That’s possible. Chalabi’s people apparently had long fantasized about overthrowing Saddam and moving into the subsequent power vacuum, and, like many expatriates from Cuba, from eastern Europe, and other places where they had been part of a deposed elite, they sought strenuously to manipulate the US into restoring them to power. At best, they don’t much care what America’s best interests might actually be.

If it is true, then the administration is looking incredibly stupid right now. They are admitting that they bumbled their way into a ruinous war in Iraq based on a scam perpetrated by a sleazy con man, Chalabi. They’re saying they believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because Chalabi told them they did. They’re saying they believed Iraq supported terrorism because Chalabi told them Iraq supported terrorism. And silliest of all, they believed that Iraqis would welcome American troops with open arms and happily assist in creating a new democratic order in Iraq that would stabilize the region because Chalabi assured them that is what would happen.

Perhaps he sent Bush an email that said that he was trying to reclaim a large family fortune in Nigeria, and needed someone to pay processing costs and would give 10% of the fortune in return for the modest loan for the costs, and please treat this matter with extreme confidentiality.

Chalabi, while refusing to deny that he conned the United States, is vociferously denying that he was a spy for Iran. For reasons which surpasseth all understanding, so is the Iraqi "governing council." Incidently, the US has already announced that this same council would be the ones determining the guilt and punishment of Ahmed Chalabi.

Next time I get a ticket, I hope to get a judge who is willing to go out before the trial and give press conferences strenuously arguing that a fine fellow like me would never break the speed limit. Yeah, that would be cool.

So, once again, everyone in Iraq is contradicting everyone else, at least on the American side. The American government is claiming Chalabi conned them into this war (and I can’t help but wonder what the alternatives are to such a potentially ruinous gamble for the admin) and at the same time, are turning him over to the very people who are staunchly proclaiming his innocence.

Putsch is supposed to address the nation tonight, and he’s expected to give a cheery forecast on what will happen in Iraq next. It comes in the immediate aftermath of yet more public relations disasters for the Putsch junta; more videotapes from Abu Ghraib, rumors of videotapes from Guantanamo, the wedding party massacre (and videotaped proof that it was a wedding and not a terrorist stronghold like the military claimed), General Zinni’s ‘60 Minutes’ interview ("Somebody screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up"), and news that American support for both the war and Putsch continue to plummet, with Putsch’s approval ratings now in the low forties.

I plan to watch. In a dark way, it should be hilarious.