Ahmad Chalabi died earlier today. Here’s my favorite story about this con man who helped talk a weak and stupid political establishment into a disastrous war, from 2004.
Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran’s intelligence service, betraying one of Washington’s most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
His ol’ buddy Hitch, another person I’m not sorry is feet under, had his own version of the story:
Hitchens then turned the subject back to Chalabi, his good friend. I asked him if he thought Chalabi had been passing American intelligence to the Iranians. “No,” he insisted. “It’s possible that with his training, you know, at [The University of] Chicago that with his own ability he was able to crack the codes. He is a mathematical genius. His expertise is cryptology. It is possible that he broke the codes himself.”
I’m not a professional cryptographer, but many of my friends are, and I can tell you that Chalabi would probably have a better chance of putting together his own H-bomb than of breaking these codes himself in his spare time. This commenter on Michael Totten’s blog (of all places) may have put it best:
To anyone with just a little technical knowledge, the idea that someone with could break strong cryptography, or was a genius no less because they published a couple of abstract algebra papers, is really out-loud laughable.
A Syria’s Screw Job
MattF
Hitchens was a professional party-goer. Not an arduous line of work, but what does that say about Chalabi?
Jerzy Russian
I used to use rot-13, but I decided I needed something at least twice as strong. So now I use rot-26 to encode all of my transmissions.
Thoughtful Today
…
If you didn’t fall for the Iraq War Lie you aren’t a Serious Person.
… I’m told.
pseudonymous in nc
Say what you like about Chalabi, but he moved back to Baghdad and stayed there, which is more than his sponsors did.
Lots of people (especially on the ‘decent’ warmongering centre-left) wanted somebody who’d tell them the right sort of lies in order to pretend that invading Iraq was a war of national liberation that would empower moderates. Chalabi was that somebody.
NobodySpecial
He didn’t have to talk anyone in that party of bloodthirsty savages into anything. He just was unsuccessful in talking his way into the top spot when they got done throwing away lives. Failed con man, RIP.
rikyrah
Melania Trump, the Silent Partner
By GUY TREBAY
SEPT. 30, 2015
Lying prone on a rug adorned with the Great Seal of the United States, the woman who might someday be first lady is wearing high-heeled sandals and a crimson bikini.
The date is February 2000. Donald J. Trump hasn’t yet thrown his hat into the ring as a Reform Party candidate, yet he’s already set in motion a machine that 15 years on will turn a voluble political maverick into the front-runner for the Republican Party presidential nomination.
The woman on the rug is Melania Knauss, a Slovene model, who at 29 is almost a quarter-century younger than her billionaire future husband. The rug is a prop in an Oval Office set mocked up in a Manhattan photo studio. Spread across two pages of the now defunct Talk magazine, Mr. Trump is seen in an inset close up; telescope back from the picture and what you’d see is Mr. Trump seated behind the presidential desk and at his feet his future wife, a woman striking in her beauty and docility.
If it is always the case in politics that you “play a role,” as Ms. Knauss observed in a caption accompanying those photos, you do this because politics is, above all else, “a business.”
Observers of the business and ongoing theater of a Trump candidacy are bound to be struck by the passive role played by the candidate’s wife, one seeming to predate gender equality, in an embrace of values from an era when a potential first lady might be less likely to have served as her husband’s former law firm mentor (as Michelle Obama once was) than his carpet ornament.
“Why do we not see her?” Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, asked recently, referring to Mrs. Trump’s near invisibility on the campaign trail, her sole appearance a wordless photo op for which she smiled prettily as her husband announced his candidacy. “One reason is that Republicans take a traditional view of marriage,” Mr. Luntz said. “And she is not a traditional spouse.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/fashion/melania-trump-the-silent-partner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=1
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
Yep, that was back when the grownups were in charge.
(This was a thing with them. IIRC, they never said exactly how Jeff/James Gannon/Guckert/Rentboy repeatedly got into the White House either.)
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@Thoughtful Today:
And if we’re told often enough, it becomes true.
Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA
@rikyrah: She’s perfect.
Chris
Sadly, I suspect half the country will simply take this as proof that “them hajjis can’t be trusted.”
Well, no, that’s taking things too far. Most of the country probably doesn’t even remember who he is.
Betty Cracker
Hitchens was as wrong as it’s possible to be about Iraq and too stubborn to admit it when it was obvious to everyone else on the planet. He was a sexist pig quite often and was possessed of many other defects. But I wouldn’t put him in the same category as “dead? good!” characters like Chalabi (and future HOFers Limbaugh, Cheney and Kissinger).
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: I think ‘Melania’ is an Asian province in Risk. One of the ones you usually just have 1 army counter in.
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: I’m fine with him being in that category. As a supposed ‘liberal’ he gave a lot of cover (at one time) to those on the right who were hawking the fiasco.
Evidently, Saddam drank him under the table one night & he never forgave him…
Iowa Old Lady
Back from voting. Only three things on the ballot: mayor, millage for a museum, and one city council seat, though that one had only one candidate, so it wasn’t much of contest. The mayoral election is non-partisan, so no party is marked on the ballot, which means you have to know what you’re doing when you go in there.
sharl
Cold medication and clear vision permitting, I’m forming a list in my haid of folks on twitter I reaaaallly want to troll with this news.
Gin & Tonic
@Jerzy Russian: Thanks for making me laugh; I’m having an otherwise crappy morning.
Doug!
@Betty Cracker:
Partly I’d put him in the “dead? good” candidate, because he’d become an embarrassment to everyone, probably including himself. You probably just can’t drink that much for that long without sustaining major brain damage. He was a talented writer when he was young.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
Hilarious, because she’s exactly a traditional spouse*.
*For the magical mid-1900s period that conservatives pretend is ‘tradition’. They can’t even get their own fake history right.
Jerzy Russian
@Gin & Tonic: Wait, you were able to read that?
benw
@Iowa Old Lady:
A phrase that many people could usefully apply to the voting booth, wars in the Middle East, and the bedroom.
MattF
@Jerzy Russian: You’d better re-encode it.
EZSmirkzz
If I am you, and you are me, and we are all in this together, why didn’t I know about this post before it was posted?
Modern technology frightens and confuses me.
Gin & Tonic
@Jerzy Russian: I used my decoder ring.
Cacti
GOPer Fred Thompson also kicked the bucket today from a recurrence of lymphoma.
I guess the people who brought up health concerns when he was running for POTUS had a point after all.
MomSense
Didn’t many of the “moderate” Syrian rebel groups join IS? The notion that the U.S. could have fixed this situation is fantastical thinking.
bystander
@Betty Cracker: I’ll take that as license to fantasize, so I would add Mitch McConnell, Dick Armey and Ma Barker, er, Bush.
Jerzy Russian
@MattF: I have got a crew of COBOL programmers implementing rot-52 for another factor of two increase in complexity. Further transmissions may be infrequent as my communications have been severely compromised. Damn those University of Chicago trained geniuses!
bystander
@Cacti: Yeah, we could have been at the end of Fred’s second term and watching the coronation of VP Giuliani.
Thanks, Obama.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@rikyrah:
Knowing the Republican base, I’m assuming one of the reasons she doesn’t speak in public is that she has a foreign accent, which would send some of them into a frenzy of terror.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@Betty Cracker:
Hitchens gets a “Dead? Good!”
Cheney, Limbaugh, and Kissinger get fuckeulogies, as pioneered by John Oliver.
Steve M.
@Betty Cracker: He was right about a number of things, and he wasn’t a war criminal first and foremost. But when the opportunity presented itself for him to enable war criminals, that’s what he did, even though he would have told you to his last breath that he was supporting the war of his own hero fantasies, not the war actually being conducted by the actually existing criminal warmongers. That’s no excuse. I hope he’s rotting in hell.
Oh, and he was a sexist pig and an overrated prose stylist as well.
D58826
totally offtopic but only in America land of the ‘patriotic’ gun owner and where a bull is more important than people. From huffington:.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
Luntz is a lying fvck. Ditching spouses is practically a Republican requirement and short of that, cheating.
trollhattan
@D58826:
Who gets the steaks?
Nemo_N
What is Hitchens supposed to be famous for anyway? I have never been able to grasp it. It’s like, a bunch of people say he is great and that should be all the evidence we need for it.
CONGRATULATIONS!
My job requires me to be at least semi-expert on the subject. No single human being could break those codes on their own. It didn’t happen.
amk
@Nemo_N:
lefty snarls?
SatanicPanic
@trollhattan: With his marital history Trump would make a great House Speaker if he doesn’t get elected president.
Amir Khalid
@trollhattan:
I don’t think you want to eat steak from a bull that was killed with lead bullets. As I understand, there’s some risk of lead poisoning.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@MomSense: Yes. We’re sending them weapons and GoPro cameras so they can make better snuff films. When Putin is backing the side of civilization you need to rethink what you are doing.
That’s being charitable. Both in Syria and Libya, this was as inevitable as the sunrise.
SatanicPanic
@Nemo_N: I consider myself fairly literate but I always felt like his writing was hard to decipher. Probably on purpose, because when I finally did figure out what he was saying it usually wasn’t all that profound.
Bobby Thomson
@Cacti: that was a few days ago, actually. He looked like Larry Hagman at the end.
Mike in NC
Will Dick Cheney lead the neocon delegation to Chalabi’s funeral? Or more likely, pretend he never heard of the guy?
Bobby Thomson
Does Chalabi’s widow get a pension for his faithful service to Iran?
Tim C.
I know this comes close to saying I’m aware of all internet traditions, but I never heard of Hitchens until the run-up and support of the Iraq debacle. Was anyone aware of him before that? Was he pushed to the forefront because he was the media-approved “liberal” supporter of the war?
gratuitous
I’m glad it was mentioned up-thread, because it should never be forgotten that Mr. Chalabi was an honored guest in the First Lady’s area at George W. Bush’s 2004 State of the Whatever Address. This man was a Republican War Machine creation through and through, and his participation in the activities that brought about so many thousands of deaths should follow him forever.
NonyNony
@Steve M.:
Hitchens didn’t believe in Hell.
I hope that 50 years from now he’s forgotten by all but a small group of specialists in an obscure English department somewhere – and that even they hold his work in contempt. It’s the only kind of hell he would have recognized while he was alive.
Amir Khalid
@Mike in NC:
The funeral should be over by now, assuming Shiites are like us Sunnis and tend to bury their dead within 24 hours. Besides, I thought Darth Cheney was afraid to travel abroad, lest he be arrested for war crimes while on a layover.
rikyrah
I admit…I thought he was Black for awhile there. Still give him the side eye.
……………………………………………
Tom Jones to get his DNA tested for black ancestry because ‘a lot of
black people still tell me I’m just passing as white’
It is unusual.
Singer Tom Jones plans to get his DNA tested to find out if he has some black ancestry, he told The Times of London magazine in an interview published Saturday.
The 75-year-old Welshman gained international fame in a career that has spanned over 50 years with hits like “It’s Not Unusual,” “What’s New Pussycat” and “She’s a Lady.”
Jones, whose parents were Welsh and English, said his signature baritone voice and thick, curly hair has prompted questions about his race for years.
“A lot of people still think I’m black,” Jones said. “When I first came to America, people who had heard me sing on the radio would be surprised that I was white when they saw me. Because of my hair a lot of black people still tell me I’m just passing as white.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/tom-jones-dna-tested-black-ancestry-article-1.2420821
trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
I just cut around that bit.
The Golux
This brings to mind a great line from “Get Your War On”:
Amir Khalid
@Tim C.:
Christopher Hitchens was something of a celebrity as a journalist/public intellectual. Also something of a bad boy. There’s an infamous incident where he took out Little Chris and showed it to a woman journo who was interviewing him.
beltane
@Tim C.: I first heard of Hitchins in the late 1990s when he was often on TV in the role of a left-wing critic of Bill Clinton.
Poopyman
@Mike in NC: Yes, Lynne is getting the formal parka out of storage for it.
eemom
That’s a Soft Cell tune, right?
/for Omnes
pete
@NonyNony: Why on earth would an English department bother with Hitchens? He had a facile but extremely superficial brain, the kind of verbal dexterity that plays best after about seven double scotches, a genuine talent for self-promotion, and — it has to be admitted — a certain taste for literature he could never emulate. He was a nasty piece of work as a fake leftist at Oxford (we were there at the same time), a nastier one as he made himself a TV reputation slandering the Clintons and their friends, and an absolute moral monster (and hypocrite) in the last decade of his life as a fascist stooge. He’ll be remembered in bars until his drinking buddies die off, but none of his writings will live.
Lurking Canadian
I take umbrage at this. The bar of “genius” is WAY lower than the bar of “able to singlehandedly hack the NSA”. I know just enough about abstract algebra to say that hell, yes, anybody who can publish in that field is a genius.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Tim C.: He was a hell of a writer at times. He wasn’t afraid to speak his mind when he know it was controversial. He was a loud and proud atheist. He wrote a scathing book about Mother Theresa and the industry built-up around her.
Here’s a transcript of a show on his book Why Orwell Matters for a taste.
Yes, he was wrong about Iraq. He was a troglodyte in many of his views. He seemed to go off the deep end when his friend and colleague Salman Rushdie was put under the fatwah.
He was unique.
Cheers,
Scott.
Calouste
@eemom: It’s a post by Doug!, so of course it’s the Clash.
pete
@Lurking Canadian: Define genius down enough and anyone who can do something you can’t becomes a genius. I prefer the older definition.
Omnes Omnibus
@eemom: Gah!
pseudonymous in nc
To re-coin what Leavis said of the Sitwells, Hitchens belongs to the history of publicity not literature.
Elizabelle
Heard that.
Thought: “Ahmed Chalabi dies. Goes straight to hell.”
I wonder if people will be “Cheneying” on his gravesite.
Cermet
Now if cheney the bloody hands and his sock puppet, bush wack would quickly follow their pet dog, the world would be a bit cleaner.
sharl
@gratuitous: Yes to everything you said, especially this bit that I’m sorry didn’t occur to me immediately:
Yes, good ol’ Ahmad, Friend of Laura. One of my favorite Kevin Drum posts of all time, in a very bittersweet kinda way.
gratuitous
When you can’t say it better yourself, quote someone else. In this case, George Galloway to Christopher Hitchens’ smug face:
Ooh, “You’re a real thug, aren’t you?” Burn city there, Chris.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Amir Khalid:
Oddly, that’s the second celebrity literal dick-waving story I’ve heard today (apparently actor Dolph Lundgren is notorious in the hotel industry).
If that ever happened to me, I don’t know how I would be able to stop laughing. It’s just such an absurd thing to do.
Calouste
@gratuitous: Hitchens vs Galloway is like the World Series of self-promotion.
Doug!
@rikyrah:
For a white R&B/soul singer, what higher praise can there be?
Doug!
@eemom:
Ha ha!
Bill Murray
@Doug!: I’m somewhat surprised you picked Rock the Casbah rather than Straight to Hell