General Petraeus is trotting out Ahmad Chalabi as the savior of Iraq. (What happened to Iyad/Ayad Allawi?) According to McClatchy Chalabi is back in action in Iraq.
Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial, ubiquitous Iraqi politician and one-time Bush administration favorite, has re-emerged as a central figure in the latest U.S. strategy for Iraq.
His latest job: To press Iraq's central government to use early security gains from the surge to deliver better electricity, health, education and local security services to Baghdad neighborhoods. That's the next phase of the surge plan. Until now, the U.S. military, various militias, insurgents and some U.S. backed groups have provided those services without great success.
General Petraeus is sending Chalabi to Baghdad neighborhoods where he’s promoting himself as a replacement for the ineffective Maliki government, promising to restore security and electricity.
U.S. officials maintain that it's up to the central government to provide Iraqis with longer-term stability. Iraqis agree, especially when it comes to services beyond the capability of neighborhood councils, such as providing electricity, bringing doctors back into neighborhoods, establishing and paying a police force and building a school system, Traditionally, Iraq's central government delivered these services.
"The key is going to be getting the concerned local citizens — and all the citizens — feeling that this government is reconnected with them," Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander here, said Saturday. Chalabi "agrees with that."
Apparently Nouri al-Maliki recently ‘named’ Chalabi "head of the services committee, a consortium of eight service ministries and two Baghdad municipal posts, that is tasked with bringing services to Baghdad, the heart of the surge plan." Only problem is that the ‘government’ isn’t able to restore services.
We all know that the only way our rulers know how to rule is via propaganda, and Chalabi seems to be the propagandist extraordinaire of this entire Iraq fiasco, so why not let him threaten the Iraqi people that al Qaeda will take over Baghdad if they don’t cooperate with the US puppet government? (Hey, it works on Americans.)
Can a historian Kossian explain what Chalabi meant when he reminded the residents of the Arab Jabour neighborhood "that Alexander the Great once traveled through their neighborhood and that, at one point, 600,000 people lived in the area."? was this some sort of threat?