Peter Galbraith: Mindless in Iraq

[grytpype]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19197

Interesting article in New York Review of Books by Galbraith of "Cobra II" and other Iraq books. Mostly stuff we already know about how Rummy disregarded military advice and sent in 1/4 the troops we needed to secure the country, with results we can all see.

But he has an interesting take on Chalabi, who is widely regarded as an Iranian spy who tricked poor retarded Dubya into invading. Galbraith thinks he is misunderstood, an "Iraqi liberal" who was sidelined by the Bushists when he wouldn't go along with some of their programs.

In the two national elections held in 2005, Iraqis voted according to their ethnic and religious identities and not for political programs. This has sidelined the Shiite liberals, including Ahmad Chalabi, who failed to win enough votes for a single seat in Iraq's Council of Representatives. Well before he was rejected by Iraqis, Chalabi had become a pariah not just to the war's critics—who blamed him for duping the administration into war with false intelligence, including claims about WMDs, and promises of a friendly welcome for the American forces—but also to his one-time patrons in the Bush administration. Ajami attributes the hostility of the Bush administration, correctly in my view, to Chalabi's refusal to kowtow to administration policy on issues ranging from de-Baathification to the investigation of corruption in the UN oil-for-food program. But the breaking point came with the bizarre accusation by the Bush administration that Chalabi was leaking sensitive intelligence to Iran.

...

In 2004, Chalabi became a victim of the same mentality, one that is prepared to sacrifice intelligence sources and methods for partisan purposes. He had personally estranged Bush by cavalierly dismissing the false intelligence about WMDs ("We are heroes in error," Chalabi told the Sunday Telegraph. "The tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.") The administration's ties with him were increasingly seen as a political liability.

The eclipse of Chalabi and his fellow secular Shiites has left the religious parties in full command of Iraq's governing Shiite alliance. Ajami, who is reverential in his descriptions of Iraq's senior ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, is convinced Iraq's Shiite clerics do not want an Iranian-style religious state and he challenges the claims of those (including me) who assert that the war has resulted in an enormous strategic gain for Iran. Personally, I believe that Iraq's long-oppressed Shiite majority is entitled to set up the kind of state that it democratically chooses. But the evidence from two national elections, the Shiite constitutional program, and the Islamic rule already in place in the south of Iraq makes it clear that they want a theocracy, with many features borrowed from the Iranian model.

...

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. That "misunderstood" "Iraqi liberal" is a convicted conman

still, in theory, wanted in Jordan to serve his sentence for a multi-million dollar fraud. Chalabi is a liberal in the sense of not being an Islamic fundamentalist. I don't know if he really was working for Iran before the invasion; I suspect it was more that he saw a useful alliance to be made with them afterwards. But I will never feel sorry for him. He was elbow deep in the manufacture of false claims about Iraqi WMD.