Iraq War: More fog rolls in

I'm not sure "fog of war" is quite the right metaphor for what's going on now.  Ahmed Chalabi, once the Pentagon's favorite candidate to be puppet ruler of Iraq, looks to be in some serious trouble with his American friends.  His headquarters raided, his secret police papers that he was given to blackmail his political opponents (and allies) with taken back, he's maybe even gotten one or two of his friends in Washington in for an espionage rap of some kind.

America's 'Best Friend' a Spy? CBSNews.com 05/20/04

Senior U.S. officials told 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl that they have evidence Chalabi has been passing highly-classified U.S. intelligence to Iran.

The evidence shows that Chalabi personally gave Iranian intelligence officers information so sensitive that if revealed it could, quote, "get Americans killed." The evidence is said to be "rock solid."

Sources have told Stahl a high-level investigation is underway into who in the U.S. government gave Chalabi such sensitive information in the first place.

In addition, sources told Stahl that one of Chalabi's closest confidantes - a senior member of his organization, the Iraqi national congress - is believed to have been recruited by Iran's intelligence agency, the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) - and is on their payroll.

Josh Marshall has been keeping close watch on the Chalabi story, as has Laura Rozen of War and Piece.

Chalabi has a lot of admirers among the neoconservative grand strategists, although don't be surprised if they all start revealing their long-time skepticism now.  Among those singing his praises were our friends David Frum and Richard "Prince of Darkness" Perle in their An End to Evil (2003), where they are complaining that Chalabi wasn't installed immediately as ruler of Iraq:

But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraq National Congress [Chalabi's group], Iraq's leading anti-Saddam resistance movement [that's a laughing-out-loud whopper there], to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad.  In 1944,we took care to let French troops enter Paris before U.S. or British forces. We should have shown equal tact in 2003. [I haven't heard what Perle or Frum has to say about the kind of "tact" used at Abu Ghuraib, but it's nice to know they're so sensitive to such matters.]  The INC offered us troops willing to fight and security forces ready to help keep order. [As the Daily Howler might say, low mordant chuckles echo in the halls.]  We rebuffed the offer, in large part because the State Department and the CIA dislike Ahmed Chalabi, the INC's leader, and because the INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis.

The State Department/CIA argument that Chalabi had no following in Iraq was wholly disingenuous.  During Saddam's long reign of terror his opponents were exiled, murdered, or silent.  Moreover, both State and the Agency had their preferred candidates - Adnan Pachachi in the case of State, Iyad Alawi in the case of the CIA - men who, like Chalabi, had lived outside Iraq for many years.  But Chalabi had spent long periods in northern Iraq, something the others had not done.  [More low, mordant chuckles.] And when he was abroad, rallying support for Saddam's overthrow, Chalabi lived with a price on his head, to which he was coolly, courageously indifferent.  No, it was not the lack of support among Iraqis that led to bureaucratic disparagement of Ahmad [sic] Chalabi; the sad truth is that for the pettiest of reasons neither State nor the CIA like Chalabi, despite his tireless and remarkably effective effort to organize and encourage opposition to Saddam's regime.  [One of the main "petty" reasons is that he was unable to account for millions of the dollars the US was giving him.] In part they didn't like the fact that he was not a puppet they could easily control.  In part they resented his many admirers among members of Congress of both parties.  [Watch to see how many of those come forward the next few days, as the low mordant chuckles continue.] In part they disliked his low tolerance for bureaucrats who were largely ignorant of the situation in Iraq and the potential contribution that Saddam's opponents could make to Iraq's liberation.  In part they were humiliated by the frequency with which Chalabi had been right and they had been wrong. [Low mordant chuckles continue to resound.]  One result of this disparagement was to limit the role of the Iraqi opposition in the liberation and postwar administration of Iraq, leaving the responsibility, and risks, disproportionately in the hands of Americans.  Seldom has the foreign policy bureaucracy inflicted such shameful damage on American interests than in its opposition to working with Saddam's Iraqi opponents.

Yes, it's scamsters like this that created the Iraq War, whose consequences we see now unfolding at a rapid pace.  In a more sane world, Ahmed Chalabi would either be serving jail time in Jordan, where he's wanted for alleged imporprieties in the banking business, or staying on the lam from country to country as he ran penny-stock operations.  David Frum and Richard Perle would be giving dreary speeches to elderly John Birchers instead of having been, respectively, speechwriter for President Bush and one of Rummy's key Pentagon advisers on the Iraq War.

Andrew Cockburn reported on the background of the raid: Ahmed Chalabi's failed coup Salon.com 05/20/04.  He observes:

U.S. disenchantment with Chalabi has been growing since it dawned on the White House and the Pentagon that everything he had told them about Iraq -- from Saddam Hussein's fiendish weapons arsenal to the crowds who would toss flowers at the invaders to Chalabi's own popularity in Iraq -- had been completely false. Some months ago King Abdullah of Jordan was surprised to be informed by President Bush that the king could "piss on Chalabi." Fanatic neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Michael Rubin may have continued to champion Chalabi, insisting that the United States should have imposed him as Iraq's ruler right after the invasion, but elsewhere in Washington his stock has been dropping like a stone.

More and more information is coming out on the Abu Ghuraib incidents:

Iraqis Provide New Details of Abuse Washington Post 05/21/04 (Even without looking at photos, this is not one for the squemish.)

And there are investigations of torture at other US facilities in Iraqand Afghanistan and I hope somebody gets a grip on the Pentagon's extralegal operation at Guantanamo soon.  That place will turn into a farm team for sadists and perverts if it's not brought under legal control.

Long-time Bush watcher and veteran Texas liberal Molly Ivins is flagging the fact that the torture revelations show how bad things can get and how quickly when characters like Bush and Rummy decide to dump the rule of law: How Fascism Starts 05/20/04.

Normally, something like Abu Ghraib can be blamed in part on the Downward Communication Exaggeration Spiral, which afflicts most organizations. Someone at the top makes a mild suggestion, and by the time it reaches the troops, it's iron-clad law. This appears to be a rare case of a reverse spiral, with the orders coming from the very top and questions being raised about them all the way down, until finally Army Spc. Joseph Darby spoke out and set off the Taguba investigation. ...

In this case, there is more than sufficient evidence pointing to the culpability of those at the top. ...

You can read all the memos and documents for yourself. It's important to know how fascism starts.

And for those who are hoping that NATO may bail us out, someway somehow - don't get your hopes up:

German Leader to Oppose Sending NATO Troops to Iraq New York Times 05/21/04

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, seeking to head off any attempt to use NATO forces in Iraq, said Wednesday that he would speak clearly against any such move at NATO summit meeting in Istanbul next month.

In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Schröder said Germany would not go so far as to block a NATO role in Iraq if a majority of the organization's members wanted it. But he added, "The problem will be that NATO would find itself in the same situation as the coalition forces are in now with regard to the confidence that the Iraqis have in these forces as guarantors of security and stability."

"I would be verygrateful," Mr.Schröder said, "if people would understand my doubts as to whether NATO really can play such a positive role as they seem tothink and will make no secret of these doubts in Istanbul."

Can Iraq become a bigger mess for the United States?  Stay tuned.  Bush still has at least eight more months in office.  If anyone can make an even bigger mess of it, he will.  Meanwhile, how are things going now?  One of Juan Cole's Iraq Shiite correspondents writes:

You are absolutely right: Muqtada has won, and alive or dead the movement he has sponsored will keep fighting the American forces until they leave. I think the likelihood of theocracy in Iraq has skyrocketed. What is the United States to do? Install Ayatollah Sistani as the anti-theocracy voice of secularism? Preposterous isn't it. History will record the Sayyid Muqtada Al-Sadr was the first hero of the Islamic Revoloution in Iraq. Iran's islamic republic has taken over 20 years and still hasn't evolved into a "real" democracy. I hope it won't take that long in Iraq. The war against the Americans will likely be followed by a civil war to oust whoever the Americans install as dictator. Then the Islamic Republic will be established and hopefully eventually evolve into a democracy, but that could take 50 years. I am not optimistic.

That wasn't exactly the rosy scenario that the Ahmed Chalabis and Richard Perles were promising before the war.

Speaking of Molly Ivins, she's pretty appalled with the way things are going in Iraq: Killing people for their own good 05/18/04.

Team, our national debate on this occupation is approaching the hopelessly dotty. This is no longer a matter of trying to decide if the glass is half-empty or half-full, or whether our media are looking at this through rose-colored glasses or through a glass darkly. What is, is. The trend lines get steadily worse.

The accumulation of American errors has cost us the goodwill of the great majority of Iraqis. As their attacks on us increase, so do our responses, so does the number of innocent Iraqis we kill, so does the number of Iraqis who then hate us and search for vengeance -- in a downward spiral ofviolence that no one sees a way out of, except for out. That's what is. ...

We are a practical people and often quite shrewd. That means knowing when to cut our losses. Let's use it now. Let's not stand around with our thumbs in our ears [having heard Molly speak live, I suspect "ear" is not really the orifice she has in mind] pretending the nincompoops who got us into this knew what they were doing. We were attacked by Al Qaeda. Let's go get them and leave the Iraqis to international authorities.

[Note 06/06/04 - this post is linked in AOL's Political Panel page right now.  To see the most current posts at Old Hickory's Weblog, click on "Back to Journal" at the upper left.]