Chalabi raid: a neo-con ruse?

[Moses]

Chalabi: Being Made To Look Independent

Yesterday Warblogging wrote about the occupation's raid on Ahmed Chalabi's home and headquarters, which resulted in, among other things, a gun being held to Chalabi's head. The official story from the Pentagon is that the raid was targetted at some members of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress who are wanted for numerous crimes, including kidnapping. Paul Wolfowitz has let on that Chalabi is also being investigated for passing secrets to Iran.

For their part, Chalabi's people have been saying that the raid was a reaction to Chalabi's increasingly anti-occupation rhetoric. One Chalabi aide told reporters that American troops "bullied him over his criticism of plans for next month's transfer of sovereignty."

But in yesterday's Warblogging post I wrote that all may not be as it appears. I wrote:



Having thought about this some more, I'm not sure that all is as it appears to be. The Pentagon needs someone they can trust to run the "New Iraq". They need a puppet. But they know that a puppet won't last a week in the presidency, they know that a puppet would lack the people's mandate to govern. They know that a puppet would never thrive or survive as a leader of the "New Iraq". Or at least someone perceived as a puppet.



I suggested that it was at least possible that the Pentagon was working to make Chalabi palatable as an Iraqi leader by making him seem anti-American and anti-occupation.

Now Robert Dreyfuss at Tom Paine reports that a junior staffer at the American Enterprise Institute — who just left a post at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans — has let the cat out of the bag. Chalabi is in fact being groomed by the Pentagon as the future leader of Iraq, being made to look palatable to the Iraqi people by making him out to be anti-occupation.

Rubin says:



“Much of the information he collected was to roll up the insurgency and Ba'athist cells. It caught people red-handed," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon adviser who is now at a conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute.



"By telegraphing that he is not the favorite son of America, the administration will bolster him, showing he is his own man."



So it looks like it's true: the man flown into Iraq by the Pentagon, provided with his own force of American special forces bodyguards, the man who was more an American puppet than any other Iraqi is still America's favorite Iraqi. We're just being nice to him and making it look like we hate him.

So, despite the numerous news reports announcing that "Ahmed Chalabi is down on his luck," Chalabi is now looking more than ever like the next president of Iraq. Chalabi is not at all down on his luck — he's just hitting his stride.

www.warblogging.com/archives/000853.php#000853

P.S. : Does anyone know to which military unit the Chalabi raid has been attributed?

[Moses]

The Circle of Feith

The Hill reported a little while back how, "No doubt, you've heard of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. You may not have heard of his nephew, Salem Chalabi, "who now has been appointed director general "to head" the tribunal that will try former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The article states that "Salem turns out to wear many hats and keeps awfully busy. In addition to being a distinguished jurist, he's also a crackerjack Iraqi reconstruction-contracts rainmaker. After American troops deposed the former regime, you see, Salem put out a shingle offering help to companies trying to land lucrative Iraqi reconstruction deals paid for with U.S. tax dollars...If you were a company looking to get on the Iraq-reconstruction gravy train, Salem was probably a good place to start. Not only did he have the ear of his uncle Ahmed Chalabi, with his close ties to the Pentagon and his seat on the Interim Governing Council, but his business partner Marc Zell was pretty well-connected, too. Who's Marc Zell, you ask? Allow me to explain. Zell is the longtime law partner of Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, one of the Bush administration's prime architects of the drive for war with Iraq. Feith's Pentagon office, meanwhile, is the one charged with doling out Iraqi reconstruction contracts. At this point, I'm going to assume you've heard enough that you're either laughing or crying at the mix of insiderism, cronyism and ridiculousness that Chalabi and his crew are making of the lofty ideals we're supposedly fighting for in Iraq." And there's yet another interesting wrinkle to the story. According to an October 2003 article in The Guardian, "American-born Mr Zell, 50, became interested in Zionism in the mid-1980s and made several trips to Israel - one of them sponsored by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, which claims the territories occupied in 1967 were given to Israel by God. In 1988, at the start of the first Palestinian uprising, Mr Zell moved with his family to the Jewish settlement of Alon Shevut on the West Bank, acquiring Israeli nationality."