First, let's recall what our tax dollars bought with the help of Mr Chalabi.
From Jane Mayer's excellent Chalabi profile in the New Yorker:
In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit "a forgery shop" that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. "It was something like a spy novel," Baer said. "It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in." Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, "he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam." In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi's specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam's human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton's National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi's help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. "It was a complete fake," Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. "That would be illegal," he said. To Baer's dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.
Back to current events! The region of Khuzestan has huge undeveloped oil reserves and is conveniently adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdistan, if you recall, is where the CIA, tools like Chalabi and pals in Israeli intelligence have happily operated for the past 15 years.
Now tie all that with the news from today:
Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, an adviser to Iran's President Mohammad Khatami, said yesterday he was "still puzzled" about who had forged a letter purportedly from him that provoked riots in Iran's mainly Arab south-western province of Khuzestan.
The letter revealed a supposed government plan to move ethnic Persians into the region, which is rich in oil reserves.
About 200 people were arrested and at least one killed in the violent protests on Friday and Saturday. "What happened was very sad and I still don't know why I was chosen," said Mr Abtahi. "The letter said Arab students would have to leave Khuzestan to study. It had real potential to provoke."
There are serious implications for Iran if unrest continues. From Al-Jazeera:
Ghulam Rida Shariati, an official in Khuzestan province told Iranian TV al-Alam that foreign parties played a role in igniting the unrest.
He warned that such ethnic tensions might jeopardise national unity, especially since Iran is about to hold presidential elections this year.
He said that order and security were restored in the region, and the government was making great efforts to calm the people down.
Al-Ahwaz town is situated on both banks of the Karun river near the Iran-Iraq border and witnessed bloody battles in the eight-year-war between the two countries.
Oil was discovered in al-Ahwaz in 1908 and Iran annexed the Iraqi-run region in 1925.
So let's recap here:
- The target area of Khuzestan is ripe for social tensions, having an Arab majority while Arabs are only 3 percent of Iran's 66 million people;
- Khuzestan borders Kurdistan, where the CIA and Israeli intelligence operate completely unfettered under the protection of the Kurds' semi-autonomous government;
- Ahmed Chalabi operated a forgery operation for a very long time capable of producing first-rate forged letters and newspapers in Salahuddin;
- Khuzestan once belonged to Iraq and only became part of Iran in 1925, after oil was discovered, creating a plausible claim that retaking it might be "legitimate" if the population rose up against the government in Tehran;
- This same area was invaded and fought over by Saddam - with US aid in the form of funds, arms and intelligence - in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s.
When I put all this together, I want to pull down my deerstalker, get out my magnifying glass and examine that forged letter very, very closely. Iran may not have 'CSI Tehran' to tell it whose fingerprints are on the letter and where the ink was manufactured, but I'm guessing they can draw some conclusions all the same.
So can we.
Comments are closed on this story.