CHALABI AGAIN?!

There are a few names that always trip my trigger when I see them in the news. Ahmad Chalabi is one of them.

He popped up this time because he was the object of a recent suicide attack. Why? Because he is as detested in his home country as he should be here. And why’s that? Because he provided a great deal of the disinformation BushCo needed to take us to Iraq. As a result, a great many Iraqis blame him for the mess their country is in now.

Spotting him as phony was easy back when he first appeared on the scene. He was paraded around Washington, D.C. as an exile from Saddam’s Iraq and the man with all the answers. He knew all about Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. He knew everybody in Iraq and could amass support for a new government there after Saddam’s removal. In short, he was BushCo’s darling. The horrible thing was that so few in our Congress seemed capable of seeing through him or the administration.

His image in D.C. only began to slip when it turned out that there were no WMDs. And then it turned out that the Iraqi people didn’t want him anywhere near their government. I don’t blame them. I don’t want him anywhere near my government, either, and the fact that he is no longer Washington’s darling doesn’t mean the neocons wouldn’t back him again if he could somehow gain control and keep things going their way. Nor does it change the fact that this administration pushed the words of Admad Chalabi ahead of the words of its own intelligence community in order to lead us into war with Iraq.

Reporters Ned Parker and Saif Hameed of the Los Angeles Times put it into one sentence that was reprinted in the News-Leader on September 6, “The politician, a longtime darling of Washington neoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, provided much of the faulty intelligence that President Bush used to justify the invasion.”

The only thing they got wrong in that sentence was calling it faulty intelligence. It wasn’t faulty intelligence. It was false intelligence. In fact, the reliable American intelligence community never considered it intelligence at all. It was the fabrication of a man who would be king. Chalabi fancied himself as the right man to take Saddam’s place as the ruler of Iraq, and our neoconservatives, eyes filled the imagined glories of unseating Saddam and establishing a permanent American presence in Iraq through a near-puppet government under Chalabi, took the bait and ran with it.

The end result is the fiasco we are still living with today and will for some years to come. Suicide bombers are not often to be congratulated, but the one who tried to take out Chalabi, though his method was unforgivable, at least had a legitimate target for his disgust. What we need in this country are a few more legislators whose understanding of the dynamics of today’s international situation is as clear as that bomber’s was.

“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” – Patrick Henry


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR