How about this: Chalabi had fallen into disregard among the Iraqi people so, in order to boost his standing and keep their one and only friend in the running for President of Iraq, the Bush Administration staged this entire show? Diabolical, huh? Oh, wait... they're not that clever.

This war is about money. About power and control.

Actually, if you really understood what you were saying, you said it yourself: it's really about making sure idiots like this guy don't put people like Saddam or his ilk back in power. It's pretty simple, but of course if you're looking for conspiracies, you can drum those up, too. As always, learning to really grasp and apply the concept of Occam's razor would help tremendously, but, sadly, it's just not as much fun as what conspiracy theorists dream up.

Chalabi, gone? But, has he really turned? His pattern is to rely on powerful sponsors and their money. Hard to imagine him going it alone.

They found out Chalabi was Clinton in a disguise!

It's Clinton's fault!

...Americans would be greeted with flowers at the gates of Baghdad...

We were, more or less. But only for about a week...

This should teach everyone that it's dangerous to say things the Bushies don't like...

I'm leaning more in Stash's direction. If one is a stooge for the occupiers in an occupied country, it might be a good (but not great, who is kidding who?) idea to pretend to rebel against one's handlers for a while. Since Chalabi has no ethics, this cannot be a breach over that. Must be an effort to hoodwink or about the money.

this is a clear case of karma coming back to bite you in the ass. i just don't know who getting the ass bite....bushie or chalabi.

jack e. jett

Tom Johnson:

The conspiracy happened in 2000. Everything else is blowback and containment.

The Bushies are too transparent to pull off conspiracy. They're driven by ideology, and they believe they're doing the right things. Their power comes not from corporate "sponsorship," but from the Christian Taliban. This is the greater threat to America.

Religion trumps logic and messes up common sense, and when leaders get religion, watch out.

Only by seeing the world through the lens of a baby Christian, newly sober by the grace of God, is it possible to understand the mind and motivation of George W. Bush. He's like a wide-eyed toddler with an invisible friend who has all power and will do anything he asks if he just prays hard enough, which requires an earnest prayer-face.

Bush is new to his faith and grossly untutored in the textbook. He's one of the cheaters who read the last chapter first to see how the book ends. This is the kind of idiocy that turned the "Left Behind" series into an industry, creating in the process a voter bloc roughly the size of the Louisiana Purchase.

A "moral" majority evangelicized on apocolyptic writings is the moral equivilent of what's happening in the Muslim world, where nothing enters the political debate without first passing approval of the religionists.

Christianity is no longer a single religion but a multitude of sects and denominations, many of which draw from the Old Testament prophecies without the education to understand that their inclusion in Christian Bibles is to point to the divinity of the Christ, and there is very little Christ in the positions they tend to take.

For example, they are against abortion because they are for life which is only given by God and therefore cannot be rejected. But many are also for the death penalty, an act that judges with the authority of God and rejects life on its certainty.

It's a slippery slope, this killing business, even for those gentle murderers, the priests, mullahs and ministers who stir up the people and bring them to arms, as they've done in Fallujah and Waco.

All prophecy is self-fulfilling. Proof is abundant.

Prophecize Armageddon, you'll get it.

By the way, in case you missed it, we lost Iraq. We'll continue losing it until we figure it out.

Curt Fisher