23 May 2004Maureen Dowd
So let me get this straight:
We ransacked the house of the con man whom we paid millions to feed us fake intelligence on W.M.D. that would make the case for ransacking the country that the con man assured us would be a cinch to take over because he wanted to run it.
And now we're shocked, shocked and awed to discover that a crook is a crook and we have nobody to turn over Iraq to, and the Jordanian embezzler-turned-American puppet-turned-accused Iranian spy is trying to foment even more anger against us and the U.N. officials we've crawled back to for help, anger that may lead to civil war.
The party line that Paul Bremer was notified about the raid on Ahmad Chalabi's house after the fact is absurd. The Iraqi police, who can't seem to do anything without us, were just proxies. We were going after the very guy who persuaded us to go after Saddam, the con man the naïve neo-cons cast as de Gaulle; the swindler who sold himself to Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Spartacus.
One diplomat from the region grimly cited an old Punjabi saying: "It's very bad when grandma marries a crook, but it is even worse when she divorces the crook."
Mr. Chalabi's wealthy family was swept out of Iraq in a coup in 1958 and he spent much of his life plotting a coup to take back his homeland, a far-fetched scheme that took on life when he hooked up with Mr. Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith, who had their own dream of staging a coup of American foreign policy to do an extreme Middle East makeover.
The hawks dismissed warnings from their own people — such as the Bush Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni — that the Iraqi National Congress was full of "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London." As General Zinni told The Times in 2000: "They are pie in the sky. They're going to lead us to a Bay of Goats, or something like that."
The C.I.A. and State Department, too, grew disgusted with Mr. Chalabi, even though State paid his organization $33 million from 2000 to 2003.
Cheney & Company swooned over Mr. Chalabi because he was telling them what they wanted to hear, that it would be simple to go back and rewrite the Persian Gulf war ending so that it was not bellum interruptus.
The president and his hawks insisted that only a "relatively small number" of "thugs," as Mr. Perle told George Stephanopoulos last month, were keeping the country from peace. Mr. Perle said the solution was "to repose a little bit of confidence in people who share our values and our objectives . . . people like Ahmad Chalabi." The neo-cons still think he can be Churchill.
On Thursday, an Iraqi judge, Hussain Muathin, also lamented the actions of "a small number of thugs." But he was announcing warrants for the arrest of thugs around Mr. Perle's own George Washington, Chalabi henchmen suspected of kidnapping, torture and theft. Didn't we sack Saddam to stop that stuff?
Now we're using Saddam's old generals to restore order — reversing the de-Baathification approach that Mr. Chalabi championed — while Mr. Chalabi snakes around like a bus-and-truck Tony Soprano, garnering less trust than Saddam in polls of Iraqis.
A half-dozen dunderheads who thought they knew everything assumed they could control Mr. Chalabi and use him as the instrument of their utopian fantasies. But one week after getting cut off from the $335,000-a-month Pentagon allowance arranged by his neo-con buddies, he glibly accepts the street cred that goes with bashing America. And he still won't give us all of Saddam's secret files, which he confiscated and is using to discredit his enemies.
Going from Spartacus to Moses, he proclaims to America, "Let my people go" — even as he plays footsie with the country that once denounced the U.S. as the Great Satan.
On Friday at Louisiana State University, President Bush told graduates: "On the job and elsewhere in life, choose your friends carefully. The company you keep has a way of rubbing off on you — and that can be a good thing, or a bad thing. In my job, I got to pick just about everybody I work with. I've been happy with my choices — although I wish someone had warned me about all of Dick Cheney's wild partying."
Mr. Bush thought he was kidding, but too bad he didn't get that warning before Dick Cheney took the world on such a wild ride.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/opinion/23DOWD.html?hp=&pagewanted
