THE REAL SCANDAL IN IRAQ

In order to understand what is going on in Iraq right now, it is simply imperative that you do a quick re-read of Childishness in Iraq written in August of 2003 and posted in Classics. This will give you the initial background on Ahmad Chalabi and the source of the vendetta Jordan’s King Hussein, the CIA, and the State Department have been conducting against him.

What’s changed is that the line in the second paragraph about Jerry Bremer following the lead of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rather than “his putative bosses at State” is no longer true. Bremer’s real boss is Robert Blackwill, Deputy National Security Advisor at the White House. He is directly in charge of US policy and operations in Iraq, and he has sold out to the squishes at State and the CIA. Which means he has sold America out to the UN.

This is a first-class disaster, folks. It is the real scandal in Iraq, not the humiliation of Baathist thugs by seven yahoos in one cell block of Abu Ghraib. The trashing of Ahmad Chalabi, epitomized by Newsweek’s cover story this week entitled “Our Con Man in Iraq,” means that State and the CIA have staged a coup in Iraq – and that only Chalabi had the guts to oppose it. So he had to be destroyed.

Here’s the sordid deal. Just like Chalabi exposed King Hussein’s conspiracy with Saddam Hussein to dismember Saudi Arabia in 1990 (again, read Childishness in Iraq), and warned that the CIA’s plot to have Iraqi officers overthrow Saddam in 1996 had been penetrated (it was, it failed, dozens of officers were shot), so now Chalabi exposed Saddam’s gigantic oil-for-food bribery scheme.

It was Chalabi’s people who found the Oil Ministry documents and gave an initial summary of the bribes to an Iraqi newspaper, Al Mada, which published a list of 270 bribe-takers on January 29, 2004. Billions of dollars in bribes were dispensed by Saddam through the UN program to politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists in over a score of countries – including the son of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the crook who administered the program, Benon Savon, and vast numbers of French, German, and Russian officials.

And Chalabi has the goods on them all. “The Iraqi regime, like all dictatorships, kept meticulous records with countless cross-references,” he notes – and all those records are in his and the Iraqi National Congress’ possession.

This left Bob Blackwill with a choice. He could cooperate with Chalabi, authorize a full independent forensic accounting of the bribery scheme, use its disclosure to flush out the massive corruption within the UN bureaucracy and force French, German, Russian, and UN support for securing peace and democracy for Iraq. Or he could panic, demonize Chalabi, and make a deal with Kofi Annan that in exchange for squelching the scandal, the UN would give its imprimatur over the creation of an interim Iraqi government to be appointed by a UN bureaucrat, Lakhdar Bhrahimi.

Now you see why this is such a disaster. The tragedy is that it could have been the total opposite, an opportunity at last to put the insufferable arrogance of Kofi Annan’s United Nations and the America-hating “international community” on a leash. The Bush White House has instead acted precisely as we would expect of a Kerry White House – sell out control of American foreign policy and national security to the UN.

For the blame cannot be laid just at Blackwill. There can be no “If only the Czar knew” cop-out. George Bush has failed us here. He has wimped out. His support of Rumsfeld and refusal to fire him over Abu Ghraib was not from strength, but from weakness. He was allowed to keep Rummy as long as control of Iraq was taken away from the Pentagon and given to State.

Bush’s capitulation was formalized on May 11, when he signed a National Security Presidential Directive giving the State Department full authority to direct US operations in Iraq after June 30, and not the Pentagon.

This is why the raid on Chalabi’s home in Baghdad on May 20, conducted by Iraqi and US security forces and CIA agents, was not only done without Rumsfeld’s approval, it was done without his knowledge. It was ordered by Bob Blackwill via Jerry Bremer, who did not say a word of the order to the Pentagon.

Then the media campaign to trash Chalabi was launched, with every pimp for State and prostitute for the CIA in journalism – from traditional Pogos like Newsweek and the New York Times to websites like Stratfor to columnists like Arnaud de Borchgrave — parroting every slander State-CIA could invent.

Arnaud’s case is especially sad, for he is converting his reputation as a legendary war correspondent into that of a trollop who writes what he’s bidden by the countries and agencies that pay him to do so. Thus he writes in a UPI column on May 20, “With Tehran’s blessing, Chalabi went to establish cordial relations with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s supreme Shiite leader.” Arnaud knows full well this is a lie – that the Mullahs in Tehran want Sistani killed – they are terrified of him setting up a separate Shia power center in Iraq and are backing the cleric-thug Muqtada al-Sadr. Yet he writes it anyway, because he was instructed to do a hit piece.

Perhaps you’re wondering here, “Yes, Jack, I know that the State Department is riddled with and run by liberal squishes – but surely the CIA folks aren’t, right?”

This may disillusion some, but the demoralizing truth is that Langley is dominated by left-wing gutless bureaucrats just like Foggy Bottom. There are a lot of good people in the Agency (or, for old timers, The Three Bad Words), especially in paramilitary ops. But a very substantial fraction of Langley desk-jockeys are as squishy as any pinstripe.

The tragic fact is that the CIA has never recovered from its emasculation by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) and Jimmy Carter’s DCI Stansfield Turner in the 1970s. Bill Casey under Reagan didn’t have the time before Iran-Contra to turn it around. Thus the disgrace of the CIA’s pathological support of Islamofascist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan in the 1980s – which was responsible for the Taliban’s seizure of power and Al Qaeda given sanctuary in Afghanistan from where the September 11 attack on America was planned.

This story is told in Gulbuddin and the CIA, written in October 2001, updated and posted in Classics.

Now we can see that the biggest mistake of George Bush’s presidency was not firing Clinton’s holdover, George Tenet and installing his own CIA Director. Tenet and Blackwill, with Colin Powell’s acquiescence, have staged a palace coup, overthrowing Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz regarding Iraq.

With Chalabi out of the way and the Oil-For-Food scandal squelched, they are free to have their stooge, octogenarian Adnan Pachachi named by Brahimi as Iraq’s interim president. This will delight all the Arab dictators and princes in the Middle East, as he is a fellow Sunni Arab, and will signal the intention of the US to help keep them in power. It will infuriate the Kurds and Shias who comprise over 80% of Iraqis.

Real democracy in Iraq and the Middle East? Fuhgeddaboutit. The pinstripe and spook sophisticates are far too “realistic” to lift a finger to achieve it – and will do their level best to stymie any effort to. They will do whatever is necessary to ensure George Bush’s noble dream of real freedom for Iraq remains a pipedream.

So as our soldiers continue to win the war in Iraq militarily, the war is already lost politically. That, folks, is the real scandal in Iraq.