CW FISHER
Pity about Chalabi. I like the word. I could type it for hours. It would have made a great breakfast item at Taco Bell. But that's over. Democrats can uncock their pointing fingers and untwist their fists. George Bush was not responsible for taking the U.S. to war under false pretenses. He was conned. Misled. Lied to. Just as we all were.
It's slowly dawning on the entire world that we've been duped in the biggest con job ever pulled off, a story so utterly implausible that even Tom Clancy couldn't have pitched it.
One man tells a lie that causes a U.S. president to invade a sovereign state against the will of the world; then, as the president's reelection campaign begins, we learn the truth.
Stranger still, the revelation of the lie has done little to change public opinion. Those for and against have merely dug in and fortified, ignoring the fact that the facts are fiction. See if you can follow this.
Three men and a basketball. The first man chucks the ball to the second man who passes to the third who shoots and scores. The crowd's on its feet: half are screaming the ball's a fake while the other half are screaming a basket's a basket. Months pass but still the crowd argues until a fourth Mann writes a book... and one by one the crowd hushes, pondering the same question.
What happened to the first man, the one who first appeared with the so-called "ball?"
The man with the "ball," the big lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction poised and ready to kill us all right now, was created in whole by Ahmed Chalabi who passed it to Vice President Dick Cheney who passed it to President Bush who invaded Iraq on the basis of Cheney's conviction that Chalabi was absolutely correct in his every assertion.
Where's Chalabi right now? Hanging out around Baghdad awaiting a crowning, possibly this summer.
Now that the many smart people have put two and two together and come up with one, you'd think Chalabi'd be scrambling for cover, maybe diving into Saddam's own pit on the theory that lightning never strikes twice, disproved a short time ago on the set of The Passion. But he's not in hiding. That's for depressed guys like Cheney, with whom Chalabi has no more use.
Article comments
1 - Hal Pawluk
Painting your "Wolfie" as a scapegoat is part of the neo con.
Wolfie was a leader in the invasion of Iraq; Chalabi went along with it because initially it got him millions, and now - apparently - will get him the entire country.
Wolfie's part became evident in 1992, when he was working in the Pentagon for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney under Bush Senior. He and Libby wrote a policy paper that leaked and generated so much flak it was pulled off the table (until it became the official National Security Strategy in 2002 under Wolfowitz, Cheney and Bush Junior).
The Wolfowitz document called for the use of military force as required, and specifically said:
"In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil."
The story was leaked to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post and a PBS interview with him in January of 2003 is quite interesting.
Wolfowitz is not the patsy, he's the co-perpetrator.
2 - CW Fisher
True, all true, and thank you, Hal. I read you often and know you've got your hands all over this story. I was looking for a quick end to an endless blog and Wolfie was handy. Scapegoats need not be innocent, and are, in fact, more useful if they're guilty as hell.
3 - Hal Pawluk
And Chalabi's INC is getting about $4 million/year fromt he U. S. taxpayer, even as he gets closer to owning a huge chunk of Iraq.
Intersting interview with him on 60 Minutes last night, but the way - essentially, "don't blame me, blame the CIA."