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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Revenge of the CIA |
| 2004-05-23 |
| As television channels replayed footage of a smashed framed photograph of the former Pentagon favourite and Iraqi National Congress leader, Ahmed Chalabi, on Friday, one adviser to the State Department could not resist a smile. "Another shattered illusion for our friends at the Department of Defence," said the adviser. "How much more can they take?" Mr Chalabi's Baghdad villa was raided by Iraqi police on Thursday. Several INC members, including his powerful intelligence chief, are among 15 people named in an arrest warrant for possible fraud charges. According to rumours circulating in Washington, Mr Chalabi himself is suspected of passing classified US intelligence to the Iranian government - reports dismissed as "preposterous" by his aides. Backed to the tune of $27 million by the American taxpayer, although monthly payments have now ceased, and once touted as Washington's choice to lead Iraq, Mr Chalabi is now portraying himself as the politician who dares to stand up to the US. In Iraq nowadays, that could be a winning pitch. Mr Chalabi's relations with Paul Bremer, the American Coalition administrator in Iraq, were never smooth. The two men soon clashed over Mr Bremer's plans for establishing an interim governing council rather than backing a speedy switch to Iraqi sovereignty. For President Bush, a crucial turning point came when Mr Chalabi openly criticised US policies in Iraq at the United Nations. Aides said that to a president who values loyalty highly and expects his friends to do the same, the public comments by Mr Chalabi - formerly the Pentagon's chief source of intelligence on Iraq, including its nuclear capability - were "an eye-opener". Elsewhere, to King Abdullah of Jordan, Mr Bush remarked: "You can piss on Chalabi." This is all, to say the least, disappointing news for Mr Chalabi's former backers, in particular the Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, who gave Mr Chalabi such enormous influence and access in Washington. A Pentagon plane even flew Mr Chalabi triumphantly into post-war Iraq last March. Richard Perle, formerly the chairman of the influential Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon, condemned Thursday's raid as "appalling". Yet in some corners of the Bush administration, the INC leader's dramatic fall from grace has been treated as cause for celebration. In 2003, US State Department and CIA officials were routinely out-manoeuvred and marginalised by hardline Defence Department planners in the build-up to war. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, was criticised for the distractions of the "UN route" to disarming Saddam. The CIA was ridiculed for its caution in assessing the imminence of the threat that Iraq posed. Both organisations objected to the influence of Mr Chalabi, who still faces fraud charges in Jordan. Both were ignored. Now, opportunities for revenge are coming thick and fast. The failure to predict and plan for an aggressive Iraqi insurgency following the fall of Saddam, and the horror of the Abu Ghraib prison photographs, have already tarnished the standing in the White House of the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his senior aides. The Chalabi raid is another blow and another cue for Mr Rumsfeld's enemies to go on the attack. "At the State Department and at the CIA, they're finally starting to swing some punches his way," said the former adviser. "When it comes to Chalabi, they've been saying for years 'not to be trusted'." On the BBC's The World Tonight on Friday, Christopher Dickie, a journalist who has known Mr Chalabi for 20 years, said: "I interviewed Ahmed about some of the controversy surrounding him. I said: 'Look, a lot of people in the CIA and the State Department say you would do anything to drag the USA into a war with Saddam Hussein'. He looked me in the eye and he said: 'Yes. Absolutely.' " Not any more. The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the Pentagon was not even consulted by the top US civilian in Iraq, Mr Bremer, before last week's raid on the home of its former protege, although a meeting was held involving both State Department officials and the National Security Council. Earlier in the week, Mr Rumsfeld had seemed unaware that INC funding of $335,000 per month from Congress was to be cut off. It is hard to imagine him being by-passed in similar fashion prior to the events of this spring. With some glee, officials outside the Department of Defence are happy to speculate on the fading lustre of Mr Rumsfeld's star. According to one former senior administration official: "We're finally beginning to see who is responsible for the mess that is Iraq. The prisoner abuse scandal is a disaster for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and co, because few people believe we're just talking about military police carrying this out. It must go further up, and Seymour Hersh's investigations (in the New Yorker) are demonstrating that. Military intelligence officers were involved. "The raid on Chalabi's villa is another humiliation. The Pentagon relied on Chalabi and his defectors for intelligence on Saddam. They relied on Chalabi for predictions on post-war Iraq. They backed the funding of him. Now he's been discarded and discredited. Senior people in the Department of Defence took all sorts of risks and they haven't paid off." The judgements are harsh, but these are febrile days in the capital. Infighting over Iraq within the Bush administration and on Capitol Hill has reached such a pitch and ferocity that, according to one official within the Coalition Provisional Authority, Washington DC is now referred to as "Sunni Triangle, West". On Thursday, Mr Bush made an unexpected visit to Congress, in an attempt to persuade increasingly restive Republican representatives that events in Iraq are under control. According to one member, the President's visit was intended to head off a "full-scale revolt". If the news continues to be as bleak as during the past month, the revolt may only be postponed. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in the minds of many Bush administration officials and formerly sympathetic congressmen, has all but destroyed the possibility of a happy ending to the American occupation of Iraq. According to one retired general: "We've gone from 'failure is not an option' to failure, of some kind, being the only option." A failure, when the stakes are this high, requires a culprit. While Mr Bush continues to promise that the United States will stay the course in Iraq, beyond the transfer of sovereignty on June 30, the "blame game" has begun in earnest in the corridors of his administration. From the State Department in Foggy Bottom, to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, lengthy briefings are being granted. Rivals, particularly if they work at the Pentagon, are being ruthlessly disparaged. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #6 State has historically been a den of self-hating exoticists, essentially a fifth column seeking to promote foreign over American interests from within. It was a notorious nest of anti-semites before WW2 and historical inertia is such among its elite families that some of this remains to this day. As a small example of State anti-Americanism, I happened to be in Scotland at the time of the dreadful Lockerbie air atrocity in 1989. The behavior of the State Department toward the families of the American victims was deplorable; condescending, inept, and sometimes cruel and thoughtless. Grieving relatives were stonewalled; told to mind their own business, fend for themselves, and stay out of the way. In one case, a box containing a victim's effects was sent to survivors with no documentation other than a note cheerfully declaring "Compliments of the US Consulate!". Fortunately, this was Scotland rather than some barbarous hellhole, so the locals stepped into the breech and provided all possible comfort and aid to the grieving visitors. The Scottish police were very busy and over-stretched, but they still found time and resources to send flowers to all the visiting relatives. Hundreds of local people volunteered to spend hours cleaning the victims' clothes and possessions and packaging them for return. Every item of clothing was removed from every bag, laundered, and hand-pressed where appropriate. My experience with the Consular Service is that American citizens are regarded as provincial boors who must be kept from inflicting their ignorance on the locals. As a former local in that part of the world myself, it is obvious to me that it is the Consular Service, not the regular American visitors, who are the boors. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-05-23 1:34:28 PM |
| #5 Bush needs to tell one or the other to stick with the plan that for sure. |
| Posted by: djohn66 2004-05-23 8:27:30 AM |
| #4 Zhang Fei, Do you read the Economist much? I do - every week. It hates Bush so much that it endorsed him for president! It supported the war to remove Saddam and wants us to succeed over there. To say its political coverage of the US is "incompetent anti-American" is a travesty. I'm sceptical when I occasionally read about the Brits being more capable in running an "occupation" - perhaps, perhaps not. The problem is we don't have the military power or the money. But some things have got so sour recently that people (even supporters) start to question whether the US has the capability of running the show. After the prison scandal, and perhaps a civil war between government departments, who's in charge? Are various US "agencies" working for the same thing? This is too important to screw up, especially over "turf wars" back home. |
| Posted by: Alastair 2004-05-23 6:44:18 AM |
| #3 There are the windmills of your mind and the windmills of our war..."like a wheel within a wheel." There's the *real* war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Culture War/War against the Dimocrats here at home and then there's the Beltway War(Pentagon vs. CIA and State). I guess State thinks this Chalabi deal is a "win" over the Pentagon. Who knows? I still don't think we've heard *all* of the story yet. Chalabi seems like a whore, but what could he have picked up on us that Iran would want to know about? |
| Posted by: Jen 2004-05-23 2:36:13 AM |
| #2 Zhang Fei, what's to bash here? The article really lays it out: Bush is being undermined by State and CIA elements that didn't want the war in the first place and are now fighting it on Saddam's behalf in the media theater. He gambled that we could avoid cleaning house in these Arabist strongholds until the election and may lose everything. (In retrospect, not firing Powell a year ago when the media sharks were circling for the UN flop was a giant mistake.) If he doesn't get down from his "hands off CEO" high horse and lay down the law within his administration soon, we're all screwed. |
| Posted by: someone 2004-05-23 1:39:48 AM |
| #1 The Telegraph really, really loves Seymour Hersh and his loopy conspiracy theories. This is the same paper that came out with Hersh's garbage about he said was a failed Ranger raid in Afghanistan. They're sound on some things, but there's a lot of that moronic condescension about Americans screwing up where the Brits would have done just fine in the article. And they really hate Rumsfeld, after what he said about the US going in without British participation. Another conservative (by British standards) publication, the Economist has always hated Bush, but it went a little overboard when it called for Rumsfeld to resign. Let's face it - the Economist's incompetent anti-American political coverage can't have won many fans in the Bush administration. Its calling for Rumsfeld's resignation can only have reinforced GWB's conviction that retaining Rumsfeld is the right thing to do. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-05-23 12:25:42 AM |