Waiting For The UN 'Fatwa'
Today we launch our NEW BLOG on Iraq and national security issues: The Dreyfuss Report. Written by veteran investigative reporter Bob Dreyfuss, TDR will offer readers the back story behind daily headlines and Bush administration antics performed in the name of homeland security.
U.S. policy in Iraq has screeched to an utter and complete halt, awaiting the arrival of the latest fatwa, not from scowly old Ayatollah Ali Sistani, but from the United Nations. U.S. officials, including the ever more irrelevant Paul Bremer, have pretty much dropped the pretense that they have some idea about what to do next. Iraq is a mess, and maybe one that can't be salvaged by anyone, even the UN. Washington is hoping that the UN can devise a formula that will satisfy Sistani, the Kurds, and the Sunni establishment for elections to be held sometime later in the year, but that's a tall assignment.
A more immediate problem is what to do in the meantime. If the U.S. hands Iraq over to Iraqis on June 30—there's still debate about that—it seems unavoidable that the current Iraqi Governing Council will get control of things. That suits its current members fine—especially since some of them, most notably Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, couldn't get elected dogcatcher unless they also control the levers of power that in turn control the elections. Holding elections at the end of 2004, and giving Chalabi and the INC a prominent place in the interim government, would do just that. And there are some suggestions that the interim regime, whether it's the current IGC, an expanded version, or a shrunken one, would have not nine presidents—its current messy scheme-but a single one.
That, too, is a formula almost calculated to boost Chalabi to No. 1, since few others on the IGC would be remotely acceptable to all parties. Chalabi's only competitor in Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian former Iraqi official. But Chalabi, a self-promoter and a Shiite, who has the continuing support of the Pentagon—which after all, still runs things there—is cultivating his sudden infatuation with the fatwa-man, Sistani, and seems likely to emerge as Boss of All Bosses on the IGC.
That's especially ironic, since more and more it looks Chalabi is being fingered as Person Most Responsible for feeding faked information to the CIA and the Pentagon about Iraq's phantom WMD. A recent story in The New York Times outlined the workings of Chalabi's so-called "information collection program," through a five-man team of INC propagandists who brought "defectors, reports, and raw intelligence" to the attention of U.S. authorities. The CIA is drastically reforming its internal procedures to lessen the chance that a bogus source will be able to hoodwink CIA analysts in the future. Is it possible, after all we know now, that Ahmad Chalabi can still emerge as the leader of Iraq? That the Person Most Responsible for lying about Iraqi WMD will soon be running an entire nation? It is.
February 18, 2004 | 4:22PM
Chalabi Scandal (Yes, Another One) link
Thanks to Newsday, and to Knut Royce, one of the all-time great reporters, we now know that Chalabi is not just a liar. He's also on the take. Royce reports that Chalabi-connected cronies—including members of his enormous family—have pocketed contracts from the Pentagon worth more than $400 million. One of them, Royce reports, allows former INC militiamen to provide security for Iraq's oil industry, giving huge power to a "private army" and giving Chalabi a lot of clout over Iraq's single most important source of cash. The second one is a deal to supply Iraq's fledgling armed forces.
Interestingly, one of Chalabi's named cronies in the Newsday story also was the beneficiary during the 1980s of millions of dollars from Chalabi's Jordan-based Petra Bank. It was Chalabi's looting of Petra Bank back then that led to the seizure of the bank by Jordanian authorities, Chalabi's fleeing from justice, and his eventual conviction (in absentia) for embezzling and fraud, for which he was sentenced to 22 years at hard labor. (The sentence still stands.)
February 18, 2004 | 4:21PM
More Conservatives Bailing On Iraq link
Add another conservative to the list of those who think Bush's jihad in Iraq was ill-conceived from the start. Most prominent of course was Paul O'Neill's kiss-and-tell book, which noted that Bush & Co. were planning the war from Day One. Now comes Arnaud de Borchgrave, not exactly a liberal, who slams the neoconservatives for bungling and deception. Comparing the WMD scandal to Tonkin Gulf, de Borchgrave, writing in the Washington Times, says that even the neocons admitted from the beginning that the war wasn't about WMD at all.
"When this writer first heard from prominent neoconservatives in April 2002 [note: April 2002!] that war was no longer a question of "if" but "when," the casus belli had little to do with WMDs," he writes. "The Bush administration, they explained, starkly and simply, had decided to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East."
De Borchgrave ridicules the idea that democracy would flourish. "The liberation of Iraq, in the neocon scenario, would be followed by a democratic Iraq that would quickly recognize Israel. This, in turn, would 'snowball'—the analogy only works in the Cedar Mountains of Lebanon—through the region, bringing democracy from Syria to Egypt and to the sheikhdoms, emirates and monarchies of the Gulf. All these new democracies would then embrace Israel and hitch their backward economies to the Jewish state's advanced technology." Umm, not exactly.
He concludes that the "amateur strategists in the neocon camp" knew that "WMDs were weapons of mass deception that became the pretext for the grand design." Yet as the following item makes clear Bush isn't giving up yet on the Grand Design, even though it lies in tatters.
February 18, 2004 | 4:19PM
tompaine.com |
