The Watch

The Watch is concerned about the increasing pressure towards feudalism in the United States from corporations, social regressives, warmongers, and the media. We also are concerned with future history concerning our current times, as non-truths which are “widely reported” become the basis for completely false narratives.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Chalabi: The Iranian Sting


Con Watch

Ahmed Chalabi must be one smooooth talker. Not enough Oooooos in smooooth to describe it, even. Because it is looking more and more like our whole Iraqi adventure/disaster was his idea.

Any fool could see that invading Iraq was a terrible idea. As I've said before, I'm just a chemist who has read a couple of historical novels, and I could predict a year and a half ago that the costs would definitely outweigh the benefits, if there were any. My capacity to imagine the bad consequences of having our young people carrying guns, occupying a country where the people looked different, spoke a different language, had different religions, had a completely different culture to ours; where the subtext of our mission was repeatedly hammered into everyone as "payback for 9/11", but yet where our successful mission depended on the "gratitude" of the people we were occupying - my capacity to see that as a recipe for disaster seems to have far outweighed that of our "leaders". And my fears have been rapidly outstripped by the horrors of reality.

So, are our leaders evil, or incompetent? Both arguments work. The evil argument is to note that even with this incredible snafu that they've created, they are making money hand over fist. Richard Perle, one of the key architects of the war, was caught profiteering from the war and had to "step down" from a largely symbolic post, but his situation hasn't really changed. As we've noted before, both Cheney and Bush personally profit, and yesterday there was another revelation about how the VPs office was involved in getting Halliburton those fat, no-bid contracts. (The potential illegality of that is spelled out here and here).

But, the incompetent argument works very well, too. And it may be that this terrible, horribly misguided idea did not spring from the minds of the neocons, but one smooth-talking individual, Chalabi. Chalabi is wanted by the authorities in Jordan for embezzling millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. The guy is a con man. But for years, he has been hitting the cocktail party circuit in DC, cultivating useful idiots like Perle, Cheney, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and others, convincing them that Saddam was a threat, convincing them that he could step in and take over Iraq if we overthrew Saddam, convincing them that the people of Iraq would be overjoyed, convincing them, in short, of all of the incredibly stupid and mendacious things that they, in turn, tried to convince the American people of as they followed his advice to the letter.

Imagine the scope of this ultimate con. Chalabi has gotten the US to spend its money, waste the lives of its children, endanger its very future, on trying to put him in power in Iraq. Just by conning a bunch of idiots who are now in positions of power in our government.

Now we come to Judith Miller. Ms. Miller wrote many, many articles for the NY Times about Saddam's horrible "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and how he was going to get us unless we invaded Iraq. She beat the drums for war, beat and beat them, cheerleading the public into supporting this invasion on a stream of lies and fantasies. As in the case of the Whitewater fiasco, the NYT has chosen to ignore the fact that they published (in the case of Whitewater, for years) a truckload of horseshit based on unreliable sources. They've never apologized for the incredibly reckless, libelous, injurious way they completely fell for the right wing shills who spun the Whitewater tales. They published every lie the right wing had to tell as fact, and have never apologized once for it (see "The Hunting of the President" by Conason and Lyons for the details. By the way, a documentary of the same name is about to open, I think on June 15th). And now, after it has been revealed that Judith Miller, who published lie after lie and is probably as culpable in getting us into this war as Cheney and Perle, had one source for her misinformation and that source was Chalabi, and that everything he told her was in fact, a LIE, the NYT has only made a half-hearted, vague apology, not fired Miller, continues to let her publish stories which carry water for Chalabi.

Uggabugga, a great blog, creates wonderful graphics, one of which is posted above, showing Miller's truly treasonous activities.

So, Chalabi, this slick, smooth talking embezzling con man, stroked a few people who are now running the pentagon and the VPs office, and has some sort of hold over a NYT reporter, and he managed to get our entire country embroiled in the hellhole that is Iraq. Way to go, Mr. Chalabi. Amazing. Who would have thought the rubes running our government would have been so gullible? In a way, though, it partially exonerates them. At least it wasn't their idea.

Have I mentioned yet that it looks like Chalabi is also an Iranian spy? Yeah, that too. Seems like our leaders are doing the bidding of Iran, getting some revenge at Iraq for all those years we supported Saddam against them. And they are using the same people to do it, too! Very slick. Bush, Rumsfeld, Iraq, Iran. . . the scandals of the eighties seem to have followed us faithfully into the new century, thanks to the traitors in the executive branch. I wonder how they will blame this on Clinton?

Bush, of course, is now trying to disavow Chalabi, just as he tried to do the same with Kennyboy ("Ken who?") Lay. And the press will most likely let him, as they always do. (Bush's flip flop on "Ahmed who?" is documented well by Atrios).

So there you have it, you other foreign governments, you axis-of-evil members. Shake before the mighty power of the American military. Tremble before us. Or, you could always con us into destroying your enemies for you, using our own money and killing our own soldiers. Either way.

Our Differently Abled Leader Watch

For those of you who braved President Bush's last televised speech, you probably noticed that he cannot pronounce the name of the prison in which the photos of Iraqi torture were taken. Uggabugga has a short audio clip of it, but if you really want a laugh, go to Le Show, and then click on the May 30th show. At about 16:15, Shearer starts discussing our embarrassment in chief. And at 18:40, he plays a hilarious remix of Bush's creative pronunciations.

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