The internetosphere has buzzed about Sy Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker, where he breaks the wobbly-minded president story out of the tabloids and into his mainstream (Carpetbagger, natch, has some very good commentary). Given the way the White House has leaked lately I’m sure that it won’t be the last story along those lines. For my money though, this paragraph hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention:
Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.
There was talk? Really? I didn’t buy into it personally, but I could almost understand the prewar Chalabi mystique. Setting aside the irony of promoting ‘democracy’ by handing over power to an unelected crony, Chalabi is ostensibly friendly to Israel, pro-west, secular-oriented and provided scads of apparently useful intel. But now that makes no sense at all. On top of the embezzlement that we already knew about, Chalabi turned against Israel when it suited his political interests. He spied for Iran, against us, and his prewar intelligence turned out to be as credible as a three-dollar bill. Where’s the appeal? It’s like the most powerful people in the world are stuck in this codependent relationship with a conman. If you’re a DC insider or an armchair psychologist, or you can fake it believably, have at it in the comments.
SteveMG
Not one single on the record source in the entire piece.
All anonymous ones.
Not one?
Please, I don’t doubt that Hersh has sources somewhere in the vast government bureaucracy that tell him that Bush talks to the Virgin Mary or whatever religious jibe Hersh wants to promote.
I do doubt, however, that that source has any contact with Bush to make such a statement.
In other words. They hear from others who have heard from others.
John Cole
Bill Burkett was busy.
BTW- WTF are you doing posting about politics when the Steelers are playing, Tim?
I am going to confiscate your terrible towel.
Brad R.
Tim- yeah, the neocons’ continued devotion to Chalabi is one of the great mysteries of our time. I even called Robert Stack in to solve it, but he wound up throwing his trench coat on the ground shouting “Fucked if I know!”
Seriously, I occasionally ask my conservative friends about the AEI crowd’s love for Chalabi and they mostly try to change the subject. It’s just bizarre.
Otto Man
I think Chalabi has incriminating photos of Dick Cheney. Photos that reveal just how twisted and sordid his “other priorities” were.
Alright, the game’s back on.
Tim F.
Radio. Lab.
Sine.Qua.Non
You’ll want to read this: The Man Who Sold the War & the followup letters linked at the end as well.
Bob In Pacifica
Scads of useful intel?
Well, useful if you want to start a war for bogus reasons.
As for Hersh’s sources, they have been pretty good over the long run. This, of course, isn’t the first story in the last couple of months that Dubya has gotten a tad loco. There was the story that he only was talking to four women. There was the Nat Enq story about him drinking heavily again. There are the reports of him doing that jaw thing that cocaine addicts do. Maybe he misses Jeff. He gets crazy, the Church advances.
ppGaz
Is it my imagination, or is Iraq about to come apart at the seams?
stickler
It’s your imagination. You’re using the future tense. There’s no “is Iraq about to come apart” about it.
It came apart sometime before Commander Bremer donned his combat boots and jetted back to Palm Springs.
But the Iranians and the Turks will probably put it back together, after a fashion. So no worries!
Randolph Fritz
[tired & sick–I don’t promise laser-like coherence]
ppGaz: oh, shit.
John: the Presidency has become too powerful; and almost any small group (by which I mean Bush and his trusted advisors) is vulnerable to skillful manipulation. The top members of the administration wanted to believe and the top members of the administration are either not very good at evaluating evidence (Bush), or perfectly willing to believe what advances their personal agendas (Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.) This is why, of couse, the Framers reserved to the Congress the power to make war and raise armies, and to the Senate the power to make treaties and appoint ambassadors; the point was exactly to set a check on such failures. In practice, a single coalition has come to dominate Presidency and Congress, and so the checks and balances do not operate.
On the positive side, it appears that that coalition is breaking up–some of it is going to jail–, and a ray of the light of reality may slip through the cracks. But the road back promises to be a hard one.
Louise
I get the sense that the Chalabi thing comes from each side thinking they/he can manipulate the other. Chalabi continues to make promises, say whatever it takes to be in power; and his supporters think, “yeah, he’s caused some trouble, but we’ve got enough on him now that he’ll have to do our bidding.”
I can’t think of another plausible answer. I mean, we all know that those who weren’t Bush had specific reasons for wanting us in a position of control in Iraq (air bases, oil, etc., take your pick) and I would assume those reasons haven’t changed. So how to achieve their goal, what with those pesky insurgents/terrorists, Iraqi leaders having the gall to make some independent decisions, less democracy and more theocracy, and, oh yes, our having totally f**ked everything up? They need someone on the inside that they (think they) can manipulate, should the country actually remain stable enough for them to use it for their purpose.
S.W. Anderson
There’s no excuse for the FBI not hauling Chalabi in for questioning when he was in D.C. recently, with preparations going on in the background to ship his felonious butt to Amann, where a prison term awaits. There is no excuse for Jordan’s king not demanding the U.S. do that, either.
Sometimes it seems as though this whole country has fallen through The Looking Glass.
As for Bush going nutty or drinking, I don’t buy it. If I read him correctly, when things go badly for an extended period, he gets quiet, resentful, somehwat withdrawn and sulks. Coming out of that, he engages in blame shifting and sarcastic recrimination.
S.W. Anderson
ppGaz, that’s a good point. I started to reference an excellent New York Times Nov. 20 story on how Shiites and Sunnis who’d been living in the same towns and neighborhoods are now segregating themselves, or suffering deadly consequences for failing to. But I see it’s fallen into the Times Select trap. Oh well.
Truth be known, there’s a civil war going on now. But just as Rumsfeld wanted no mention of a guerrilla war shortly after the invasion, when a guerrilla war was getting under way, obviously, the administration doesn’t want any talk now about the civil war that’s going on.
So, it’s just a case of these Shiite death squads going around, offing Sunni families and groups. And it’s just Sunni insurgents doing what they’ve done practically since our troops rolled in. But it’s not a civil war. Oh no, of course not.
stickler
Oh, I can think of one good excuse.
He’s working for “us.” Definition of “us” is up in the air, but that’s the least disturbing excuse that comes to mind.
scs
I saw some reporter on TV, I forget who now, say that he spoke to admin types, and they believe that since Iraq is so messed up, you might need an evil genius type like Chalabi to run the country. Only a smooth talking double crosser like him might have the skills to keep all the factions happy and together. They don’t doubt that he wants a secular democracy, and most of all, they see no other clear frontrunner. So there is a little logic there. Who knows if it would work or create more problems than it solves.
scs
The only difference now is that Sunnis are being persecuted as well as the Shias. Plenty of Shias “disappeared” in Saddam’s time too, hundreds of thousands, so it’s not like Iraq was all roses before we had the ‘gall’ to topple Saddam. Saddam just kept all the killing in a more organized, hidden fashion. Payback is going to happen in Iraq, no matter how successful or democractic the Iraqi government becomes, and is probably sadly going to take resettlement of some populations into more homgeneous areas, like in Bosnia. However, as we’ve seen in Bosnia, a semblance of peace can be achieved after all the initial vengeance and power struggles die down.
Kimmitt
And this is different from the average front-page story in the NYT how?
Stormy70
Exactly. Which explains the reason they are laying people off, since their stories are full of made-up crap. Sy Herch?! I don’t take any reporting of his seriously, either.
John S.
American-occupied Iraq: Still slightly better than Saddam after three years. In fact, thanks to Democracy©, the death squads no longer discriminate against the Sunnis.
Whereas your comments, Stormy, are taken to be critically and factually accurate…
Baron Elmo
The fact that Ahmad Chalabi is still getting his ass kissed by the Bush administration is as scathing an indictment of the White House’s credibility as anyone can find… and the fact that they relied upon him in any way is in itself sufficient cause for investigating their role in the buildup to the war.
Chalabi played the WH, the Pentagon and the New York Times like they were hillbilly rubes at a three-card-monte game… and this was AFTER the State Department and the CIA had concluded that he was unreliable and clearly working his own angle, having pulled similar scams during the Gulf War.
Chalabi stovepiped his reports straight to the White House, who never bothered to run them past our own intelligence professionals… probably because they would have rained all over the Bush parade by debunking nearly every detail. Then he took the same garbage to Judith Miller at the Times, who would nonchalantly call the White House and/or the Pentagon for confirmation.
Chalabi gave us the all-too-appropriately monickered Curveball, who fed the WH mountains of bullshit, including the dirt on Saddam’s so-called fleet of “mobile germ weapons factories.” (Too bad no one in the administration stopped to ask themselves why anyone with two brain cells to rub together would want to build GERM LABS on WHEELS.)
Furthermore, Chalabi and the INC bear a large chunk of the blame for the Pentagon’s and White House’s near-complete disregard of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, a 2000-page plan for a post-Saddam nation (eight months in the making), that relied on the input of hundreds of Iraqis. This plan dealt with such niceties as, oh, public health, humanitarian needs, water and electricity, agriculture, the environment, the Iraqi economy, public finance and accounts, transitional justice, the prevention of looting, public outreach, education – you know, all the things that Bush and company were completely unprepared to deal with when the smoke from the invasion cleared. Why was all this valuable taxpayer-subsidized work tossed in the dumpster? At least partially because Chalabi and his “Gucci guerillas” didn’t approve of the results. (The State Department’s opposition to de-Baathification and their disdain for Chalabi in general were probably major factors here.) Read the details:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Future_of_Iraq_Project
Chalabi and the INC were handed nearly 40 MILLION DOLLARS by the Bush administration (to be fair, Bush 1 and Clinton gave them plenty, too), and they have yet to provide anything close to a satisfactory explanation as to just what the hell we got for all that cash.
Chalabi was the one who pushed the rosy scenario of post-war Iraq, in which we would be greeted as liberators and the nation would gratefully convert to a Western-style democracy . Hell, he managed to convince the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle that a Saddamless Iraq would gladly (wait for it…) SELL OIL TO ISRAEL. Now, the guy has the unmitigated gall to say, “We were heroes in error.”
And finally, the cold crusher: a very strong case can be made that Chalabi was acting as a double agent for the Iranians all along… or is acting as one now. Of course, Bush and company would be just as happy to forget that little tidbit – which may be why Dr. Ahmad has yet to be investigated in any real way for his reprehensible actions.
What I fail to understand is why the White House is having anything to do with him, other than lining up a Special Ops agent to have the little weasel neutralized… or why conservatives aren’t screaming for his head on a stick. How many deaths have his lies added to the war’s grand tally?
There isn’t a hell deep enough for the bastard.
Tim F.
Well SCS, I have to give you an A for effort. The shortcoming of that plan is that ordinary Iraqis despise Chalabi. As a leader he would have the effect of unifying Iraq alright, against him.
Cyrus
You’re assuming that the “skills to keep all the factions… together” he would possess, would be effective with, and would prefer to use, are diplomatic skills. What if, and call this a really crazy, out-there hypothetical, but what if he uses skills of the, say, torturing variety? The sham election skill? The poison-gas-internal-dissidents skill? The get-supported-by-the-USA-because-he’s-less-bad-than-his-rival skill?
Think about what you’re saying here. Do you really think the administration is supporting or should support Chalabi because they believe he has the skills Saddam was famous for?
ppGaz
Heh.
Sojourner
Of course you don’t. His reporting creates too much havoc in your sheltered little life.
scs
Once again Tim, you are taking my words out of context a bit. I was just portraying what this source thinks the Bush Admin thinks. Not me personally. Although I can see their logic a little, doesn’t mean I agree with it necessarily. Just for the sake of debate, man, lighten up.
Well I think the Admin doesn’t think Chalabi’s of the violent, torturing kind. I think they think he’s more of a benign corrupt swindler kind. Hence that’s why they may think he’s preferable. Hey, you gotta make do sometimes.
ATS
“Sy [sic] Herch?! I don’t take any reporting of his seriously, either.”
I trust he will take care lest the tears he sheds over your rebuke will stain one or another of his Pulitzers.
chef
Bush is hearing voices again? One recalls Kissinger’s account of Nixon praying on the Oval Office rug during Watergate.
Perhaps Laura will tie a yellow ribbon to the White House “Holiday” tree.