Quisling Chalabi

I may have been too hasty in believing that the government had no plan. Wolfie of Arabia and his cohorts most certainly did have a plan, one that they had on the drawing board for many years. Barbara Bodine, by the way, was the choice of the State Department and the Pentagon hawks don’t want her near their little fiefdom. (Of course, she is a piece of work in her own right…) It is still unclear whether she will be part of the occupation. The problem, as usual, is that the government has more than one plan and it remains for President Junior to make a decision as to which faction he’s going to favor today. I hear he's feeling testy so who knows which way the wind is going to blow.

If today’s reports are to be believed, it is quite interesting that while the GOP congress has decided to give the State Department the purse strings, the Pentagon is still calling the shots on the post war planning. This promises to be another battle royale for the soul ‘o Dubya, and the ongoing and endless quest for control of American foreign policy. If the congress takes a stand as well, this could get very interesting.

Joe Conason has more to say about the post-war occupation cock-up and points to this editorial from the Washington Post that names names and points fingers. In particular, he discusses the neocon pet Ahmed Chalabi, the putative head of the Iraqi National Congress

I had been under the impression that Chalabi had been effectively sidelined some months back when the state department declined to give him any more “covert” money that he could not account for. But, I should have known better. He’s a member of the in-crowd and I mean the super-in-crowd --- the Wohlstetter/Wolfowitz/Perle nexus of true believers. They will fight for him:

This article from The American Prospect gives the lowdown on Chalabi:

In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.


And here’s more evidence of the wooly headed, think tank insularity of the neocon claque:

What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he's a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter's leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called "The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq," which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI's 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. "The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years," Perle told me.


The Plan:

Almost no one, not even the INC itself, thinks that Chalabi has any cachet inside Iraq. Entifadh Qanbar, the earnest, young ex-Iraqi officer who heads the INC's office in Washington, says that Chalabi represents Iraq's "silent majority." Asked whether people in Baghdad have even heard of Chalabi, Qanbar says: "They may not know the man. But he represents their views."

Others scoff at even that notion. "It's a formula for setting up a puppet regime," says David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs who's dealt extensively with Iraqi opposition politicians and military officers. "And we will have responsibility for propping them up for a long, long time to come, possibly with the blood of American soldiers."

But indefinitely propping up an INC-style quisling regime might be exactly what the United States wants, as it would mean that U.S. troops would be occupying Iraq's oil fields for years to come.


Now, at least according to the NY Times article discussed below, it is unlikely that they will set up Chalabi as the head of government, at least right away. But, all of those newly minted neocon idealists who truly believe in their shiny little hearts of gold that America will bring peace and democracy and love for all the little children to the middle east with Operation AEI Wetdream need to take a closer look at the history of the people who have been planning this war for decades.

I do believe that some of this neocon madness is starting to seep into the mainstream. The W. Post has been single mindedly pro-invasion and yet they are starting to sound very skeptical of the occupation planning (something you’d think journalists would have found the time to investigate before now fergawdsake.) Perlegate drew some unflattering attention to one of the premiere architects of the Neocon Pentagon faction of the administration. Their loudmouthed assurances of Iraqi defections (predicated upon “intelligence” by none other than Ahmed Chalabi) have seriously damaged their credibility.

If Democrats operated like Republicans, every single Dem would be pounding the neocons at this moment. Salon would do a story a day. Bill Press would enlist Pat Buchanan in a rousing denunciation on each show. The backbench firebrands in the congress would hold press conferences. Oppo researchers would distribute literature about the wacky neocons to every journalist on the beat.

They would shrug off “anti-american” criticism saying that they are not concerned about the war effort itself. No matter how badly Rumsfeld planned it, we have complete faith in our most respected and competent military. What we are worried about is the aftermath which is being poorly planned by a cabal of radical ideologues who have duped the poor over-his-head President into supporting their crazy plans. They would not care if they were thought of as tin-foil hat wierdos because all that matters is getting the word repeated and talked about. They would build the whispers so that when the war (not likely to really “end” for some time) moves into the occupation phase, this information is already churning in the media sludge.

But, all we’ve got is this lousy Casio. A story like this will fade away in the white noise of flagwaving, yellow-ribbons and Jessica "Old Shoe" Lynch.