When puppets pull the strings:
Ahmed Chalabi, the neocons' choice to run Iraq, appears to have been responsible for the disastrous decision to move against Muqtada al-Sadr. - By Martin Sieff
Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan -- sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor -- but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. Although he is a Shiia, the 60-year-old Chalabi had not lived there since age 12, and when he returned he surrounded himself with a U.S.-paid personal militia but had no political following. Without his U.S. sponsors, he would not last five minutes as a force. He is widely suspected of profiting enormously from U.S. contracts in the country. After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon's payroll -- $340,000 a month -- not counting the $40 million that he's received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.
Just as Bremer will not make the slightest move without the approval of his Pentagon bosses, the Defense Department policymakers continue to rely on Chalabi alone for their political assessments on Iraq. In private conversation, as in public, they remain amazingly enthusiastic about Chalabi's supposed political skills, and even genius, and proclaim repeatedly that he is the only man with the brilliance to hold Iraq together and make it work. Give Chalabi a free hand after June 30 and give him all the U.S. firepower he wants to crush his foes -- this is their master plan; there is no other.
Once again, this in the face of evidence to the contrary:
The CPA actually had some "hard" data to support this wildly inaccurate interpretation. For U.S. military intelligence assessments in Iraq had concluded that al-Sadr was a fading force. The crowds attending his sermons were smaller. The number of armed supporters he could count on to exert his will was decreasing. The tone of his public pronouncements was becoming shriller and more desperate as the June 30 hand-over date to Iraqi leaders approved by the U.S. authorities came closer.
This information was not false or wishful thinking. It appears to have been entirely accurate. The problem was that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, without whose say-so Bremer does not even dare to breathe, misinterpreted it. By moving against al-Sadr when they did not have to, they revived the firebrand's credibility throughout Iraq's 65 percent majority Shiite community. And they also opened the door for something neoconservative pundits had unanimously agreed was impossible: They made common ground between Sadr's Shiite supporters and the Sunni Islamist guerrillas who have been fighting the United States implacably in their own heartland of central Iraq.
Krugman weighs in Snares and Delusions
"...officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files -- a fine tool for blackmail -- and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks."
Perhaps it will be Kerry's and Levin's efforts which break up this marriage and recue the besotted and thereby the world: Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding