Was Tehran Snickering While Chimpy was Smirking?

SixofNine

CNN just showed it...that will stir the pot

article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224075,00.html

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.

US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war

· Inquiry into Tehran's role in starting conflict
· Top Pentagon ally Chalabi accused

Julian Borger in Washington
Tuesday May 25, 2004
The Guardian

An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday.
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.

According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.

The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.

"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the state department, said: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

Elsewhere

I would love to believe this... but given the reliability of the US's intelligence in the middle east, I have to doubt.

Iraq has WMD!!! Opps! Never mind!

Oh wait a minute? Iran told us that Iraq had WMD and we believed them? it?s not out fault!

Satanus

Global cop gets played by one of the slick old timers? Interesting. Maybe more on this will come out.

SS

Euphemism

I doubt that Iran would deliberately try to get the US to invade Iraq. Why would they want the US to have a base of operations right on their doorstep?

But the truth is even more pathetic. We got snookered, not by another nation, but by the INC... a bunch of exiles and refugees with little structure or money, just a good story.

Satanus

But, let's not forget that chalabi was friends w some of the jewish set. They were also feeding him info. Iraq was enemy numero uno of israel and neocons. Wouldn't it be slick to blame another muslim country instead, when //it starts hitting the fan?

SS

myauntfanny

Oh, arrggghh. Why are they launching a frantic investigation now when these intelligence sources were known perfectly well to be suspect all along? It seems a pathetically obvious attempt to shift the blame now that approval of the war is dropping in the polls. Ass-covering time! I am sure that Iran did do some manipulating of intelligence, but Bush and company already wanted to invade Iraq so Iran provided a convenient excuse, and will now provide a convenient scapegoat.

Simon

It seems the US and UK always imagine that they are using other countries for their own ends and that unsophisticated "johny foreigner" is easy to control and manipulate.

It seems that **some of us** only realise too late that they may be technologically less sophisticated than us but they have been playing politcs and sides for many thousands of years while we were all digging in the mud.

Seems the bush babies may have been suckered ?! Why am I not surprised ...

Pleasuredome

cia motto should be - "cause problems, blame others". if anyone thinks that the iranians have been shafting the US into going to war with iraq..... well...... lmao. pnac

Richie

Interesting reading on Chalabi:

MAY 21, 2004: THE CHALABI RAID (from National Review Online)

The huge news of the morning ? the raid on Ahmed Chalabi?s offices and home in Iraq ? interrupts everything, including yesterday?s half-finished piece on Irshad Manji. I?ll be back to that, but now let?s deal with the headlines.

I won?t link to all the triumphant cackling over Chalabi?s troubles: there?s just too much of it. You can go to the Google news bar, enter ?Chalabi? and ?neocons? and spend a whole morning on it.

Let me just offer this one generalized response to it, speaking not as some kind of neocon hierophant, but just for myself:

I?ve met Ahmed Chalabi some four or five times over the years. Each time I was impressed by his intellect and his professed commitment to liberal democracy.

Beyond my personal impressions, it is simply a fact that he managed in the 1990s to build an anti-Saddam coalition, the Iraqi National Congress, that drew representation from Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Kurds; and across the ideological spectrum from religious leaders and from communists. It seemed to me that if Chalabi could achieve consensus within the bitterly fractious Iraqi exile community, he might well be able to do something that many foreign-policy experts thought impossible: govern Iraq without the use of murderous violence.

That said, after 9/11, I would have supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein even if Saddam?s killers had succeeded in assassinating Chalabi before I ever heard of him.

Saddam Hussein was a menace to the United States and to the region. After 9/11, the risk of leaving him in power to wreak mischief was simply intolerable. Saddam had to go ? for the same reasons that the mullahs of Iran still have to go. Americans can no longer casually accept that major Middle Eastern countries will be controlled by regimes that promote terror and seek weapons of mass death. That is the Bush doctrine. It was right when it was announced on September 20, 2001, and it remains right today.

Nobody I knew ever argued: Chalabi needs a country to run; let?s go overthrow Saddam for him. They argued; Saddam is a threat to the United States. He must go. And since we do not want to leave behind only rubble ? since we would like to leave behind a functioning, decent, and more democratic state - Chalabi looks like the most promising candidate to replace Saddam, at least at the start.

The job that Chalabi?s supporters envisioned for him was not ?president of Iraq.? It was ?provisional president of Iraq.? We saw him playing the role that DeGaulle played in France in 1944: providing some troops and putting a national face on an international intervention. As with DeGaulle, it was always possible that the Iraqis would dismiss him as soon as the provisional period ended: remember, DeGaulle lost power in 1945, seemingly forever. That possibility was understood and accepted: Chalabi?s supporters supported him because they thought he was the best available path to a more democratic future for Iraq ? but it was that more democratic future, not him personally, to which they were ultimately committed.

There is one more preliminary that has to be dealt with ? what we might call the Fritz Hollings question: Was Chalabi supported because of his large promises about Israel? Again I can only speak for myself. I am a supporter of Israel, a strong supporter. I never heard Chalabi speak about Israel, though I was aware that he was supposed to have said some romantic things about possibly someday reopening the oil pipeline from Iraq?s northern fields to Haifa in Israel. My reaction? I didn?t believe him. Chalabi exuded a strong nostalgia for the more humane and tolerant Iraq that he claimed to remember from his youth. I understood the pipeline fancy in those terms: as a yearning for a more civilized Middle East, free from the murderousness and crazed anti-semitism that has gripped it since the 1970s. But did I think Chalabi would ever have the political strength inside Iraq to make good on the pipeline fancy? No I did not. I believed that if he ever succeeded in coming to power, he would have difficulties enough on his hands without being a leader in the task of making peace with Israel. In the supremely unlikely event that he ever asked me for advice on the matter, I would have told him: Just make a better Iraq. That will be service enough for all the people of the Middle East, Israel included.

OK. Now to the headlines.

What are we to think of this raid?

Chalabi?s many enemies and detractors have let loose a huge swirling mass of innuendo and conjecture about what exactly the raiders were looking for. Was Chalabi plotting a coup? Was he leaking secrets to Iranian terrorists? Was he embezzling money or counterfeiting currency? It is puzzling to me that the same people who refuse to believe the US government when it says its forces hit a terrorist safe house, not a wedding partner, are all credulity when anonymous sources inside that same government declare that Ahmed Chalabi is the center of a vast sinister conspiracy.

Chalabi?s friends have meanwhile responded with conjectures of their own: that the CPA has done a deal with Lakhdar Brahimi and the United Nations. It is Chalabi more than anyone who has exposed the full magnitude of the UN oil-for-food scandal, including possible involvement of Kofi Annan?s son ? the UN is determined to shut the investigation done, and these days the US government is eager to placate the UN.

These are all mysteries. Let me deal instead with certainties. Leave to one side for a moment, the most insane of the rumors: the coup, the terrorists. Let?s deal with the allegations that have been sourced to the CPA not to the Baghdad street.

Suppose it turns out to be true that Chalabi has been building a patronage empire. Suppose individuals close to him have been positioning themselves to get rich in the new Iraq ? hell, suppose he himself is the ?crook? that his detractors always say he is.

Here?s my question: When did America?s standards for our Middle Eastern allies get so excruciatingly high? How can it be that former Republican Guard generals, and terrorist-subsidizing Saudi monarchs, a this-time-I?m really going straight Col. Qaddafi, and even the nuke-making mullahs themselves have all become acceptable interlocuters ? but Chalabi?s offense of putting his nephews into important jobs has suddenly become intolerable?

Iraq is a difficult place to govern. We always knew that. Since the British cleared out, the country has been held together in one of two ways: by violence on a horrific scale or by patronage and deal-making in a nearly equally grand scale. Chalabi is deal-maker. If that?s the reason for excluding him from the future government of the country, it?s a foolish one.

I mentioned Charles de Gaulle. In some ways, historical analogies have been the bane of the whole war on terror. This war is not World War II, not the Civil War, not the Cold War. It is its own thing, and analogies can be deceptive far more often than they are enlightening. But let me propose not an analogy, but a comparison.

The intensity of the hatred now unleashed in the direction of Chalabi (and maybe even more his American sympathizers) from liberal-minded people in the press and the government has in my memory and reading been equaled only once before: and that once was in the 1950s, when Chiang Kai-shek and the ?China lobby? got the same kind of press that the Ahmed Chalabi and the ?neocons? now receive.

And some of that bad press may even have been deserved. Chiang Kai-shek was a very flawed person who ran a very flawed state. The ?China lobby? did often put exaggerated faith in Chiang and was sometimes too ready to excuse his wrongdoing. That said: in the light of history, Chiang?s offenses ? real as they were ? dwindle to nothing in comparison to the evil against which he fought. The errors of Chiang?s supporters ? consequential as they were ? dwindle to nearly nothing in comparison to the errors of those Americans who condoned or denied the horrors of Maoism. And in the end, out of all of Chiang?s misdeeds, there emerged a decent democratic state on the island of Taiwan. The China lobby looks pretty wise in the light of history. Kind of noble too. Judgment?s still out on those of us who sympathized with Ahmed Chalabi and the INC. But we await history?s verdict with confidence.

Was Tehran Snickering While Chimpy was Smirking?

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