Posted on 05/21/2004 9:16:55 PM PDT by Destro
Busted neo-con icon
Published: May 22 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: May 22 2004 5:00
The spectacular rise and sudden downfall of Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the Pentagon ideologues who launched the war in Iraq and saw him as its future leader, would look Shakespearean in its plot development were it not so shabby, and the irreducible reality of Iraq not so bloody and still so distant from catharsis.
Front pages across the world illustrated the drama through the splintered glass of a framed portrait of Mr Chalabi, smashed after US troops raided his Baghdad house on Thursday. As the ghost of Hamlet's father put it in a different context: "Oh what a falling off was there!"
Mr Chalabi's recent history in many ways encapsulates the delusionary nature of the US adventure in Iraq - not least because it was he who fed these delusions to his patrons at the Pentagon. Some of the most alarming stories the Bush administration passed on to its allies as intelligence - such as the one about Saddam Hussein's mobile biological weapons laboratories - were the fabrications of defectors supplied on demand by Mr Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC). Colin Powell, the US secretary of state who repeated these assertions to the United Nations Security Council as justification for the war, earlier this month described that particular information as "deliberately misleading".
Mr Chalabi's claim that Iraqis would welcome US troops with flowers, moreover, played perfectly to the gullibility of the neo-conservatives in and around the Pentagon who had long been determined to invade Iraq and use it as a lever to reshape the Middle East. But if they were taken in by these stirring tales, it was and is their fault; the record of Mr Chalabi is no mystery.
The INC leader is a brilliant man who lobbied Washington with charm and conviction. A western-educated, secular member of Iraq's Shia majority, he must have seemed an ideal projection of Iraq's future after regime change, a seductive image confused as reality. It seems to have given no one pause that he had no standing in Iraq, which he left as a boy. Or, indeed, that he was best known in the region for the Petra bank fraud in Jordan, for which he was sentenced to 22 years in jail in 1990 (he fled the country to avoid imprisonment). He says he was set up by Saddam; that is not what knowledgeable bankers in Amman and Beirut say.
In 2001 the INC - which has received nearly $40m (£22.5m) from Washington - fell foul of a US audit reported to have uncovered expenditure on paintings for its offices and gym subscriptions for its staff. Now, it appears, the INC seems to have profited from last year's currency changeover in Iraq. Mr Chalabi, a gifted mathematician whose doctoral thesis was on Knot Theory, has left a lot of loose ends dangling in his controversial career.
Unsurprisingly, when the US flew him and his self-styled "Free Iraqi" militia into Iraq last year, those Iraqis who knew him were unimpressed. His part in persuading the occupation authority to dissolve the regular army, as well as a blanket purge instead of the selective rooting out of Saddam's henchmen, top the lengthy list of misjudgments of the past year. So bad has Mr Chalabi's relationship with his former patrons become that officials in Washington are accusing him of passing US intelligence to Iran.
Yet it would be quite wrong to make Mr Chalabi a scapegoat. Ultimately, he was the construct of geo-political fantasists in Washington, which is surely where the responsibility lies for his and their shortcomings.
Really??
A Freudian slip on your part?? - So are you saying our current Iraq mission is really linked to preserving the state of Israel? Because I read this article and I saw no mention of the state of Israel.
In 1979, Irving Kristol wrote in favour of "a conservative welfare state", because, for him, it was "perfectly consistent with the neoconservative principles".
Some people use neo-con as a pejorative,to slur Jews.Some people on FR,use it as a slur,to smear anyone and everyone who doesn't agree 100% with them.
Tell me,do neo-cons,such as Ronald Reagan,spout "drivel"?
Though admittedly Reagan was still singing FDR's praises,when Reagan was in the White House,just what part of his "AGENDA" was the new and improved,newly repackaged, dangerous leftist inspired drivel you talk of?
Oh man........
I just looked.You may be correct...re his age.
That makes two of us.
Perle is a Democrat?? Would he happen to be Jewish too?
Dang you can count.
Yes they do, like clock work....
Nice way of putting it.
I would also add - when challenged hide behind the smear of 'anti-semite' - a new and improved version of Al Sharpton's tactics.
How old are you?
Hey, it's neopardons!
Down right scary stuff.....
Old enough to vote.
he was used, paid and now is asked to leave.
I think he should go to Jordan where they have a nice comfy room waiting for him with the rent paid for some 22 years.
Mores the pity. You do realize that the arming of the Muhajdin in Afghanistan thet led the Soviets to defeat was the single most important element of the downfall of the USSR?
What caused the fall of the Soviet Union was not Afghanistan - but cheap oil and gas prices which deprived the USSR of hard currency via oil and gas exports.
Clinton was the one who brought him into the fold.
LOL! One of these day, you guys are going to have to give up blaming Clinton for everything. Last I checked, that idiot hasn't been President for several years now. Hehehe.
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