What a Week

THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

Illustration: Bill Clinton before his defense of his wife, Hillary. Bill said, about Hillary, "After all, it was after 11:00, she was exhausted, and she's over 60" (Bill like blondes, Hillary used to have dark hair.) Another reason for the ilustration is just that I've liked Sheryl Crow since she was banned in Wal-Mart.

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Let's just review a few things that have happened in the last few days.

The Clinton headquarters in Indiana burned down and Bill said "We will rise from the ashes," an apparent reference to the Phoenix. I hope so. The Phoenix does that every 500 years according to the myth, so we will be safe for awhile.

George Bush said we will know when our job in Iraq is finished when it [Iraq] is able to help us fight our enemies! Guam? No, he probably means Iran.

Bowling seems to be an important factor in this election. Neither Hillary nor Obama were able to knock down more than one or two pins at a time. However, I remember George Sr. once demonstrating his style, which was ok, except he forgot to let the ball go and its momentum carried him forward and onto his face on the bowling lane.

A recent Poll indicated that a McCain/Rice combination would defeat an Obama/Clinton one. Why on earth would anyone take such a poll? It ain't gonna happen nohow noway anywhere not never. [Just practicing syntax in case I want to run for political office. Local Libertarians have talked about my running for Sheriff as I've told them I'd never show up at my office unless they let me smoke there.]

I've noticed that there is a lot of protest over the Olympic torch going around the world. The Dali Lama is against the protests. I don't follow - it would seem that American politicians, who are so fond of quoting Hitler, would like to keep this grand tradition he started alive. Munich. Jessie Owens. You know.

A bill has been introduced into the Senate to make John McCain a "natural born citizen." See, he was born in Panama, both parents citizens, so the citizen part is no problem. It's the word "Natural" that some people are worried about. It's absurd, of course, but that does not exclude it as important news.

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Here are a couple articles about the cost of the occupation of Iraq. They seem appropriate as this is the bloodiest week of the year for American Soldiers in Iraq:

Three Trillion Dollar War Review

April 09, 2008 By *Girish Mishra*

Girish Mishra's ZSpace Page </zspace/girishmishra>

Karl Marx once remarked: "War in direct economic terms is just the same
as if a nation cast part of its capital into water." After many decades,
once again, the validity of this statement has been underlined by the
invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US-led coalition. A period of
more than five years has elapsed, yet there is no sign of freedom,
democracy and prosperity as promised to the Iraqi people. In fact, the
invasion and continued occupation has brought enormous devastation of
this ancient country, nor has it done any good even to the people of
America and its coalition partners. This has been analyzed at length in
a recently published book, /The Three Trillion Dollar War,/ by Joseph
Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.

No way, this book can be ignored by terming it as mere propaganda. Among
its authors is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, who once
headed the team of economic advisers to President Clinton and then
became chief economist at the World Bank. His books have been widely
read and discussed all over the world. Linda Bilmes teaches at the
Harvard University and was once a high ranking official in the Clinton
administration looking after financial and commercial affairs.

At the time of American invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration gave
out that its aim was to liberate the Iraqi people from the clutches of
Saddam Hussein, giving them freedom and democracy and putting them onto
the path of happiness and prosperity and, this mission would cost just
$50-$60 billion. Lawrence B. Lindsey, then economic adviser to Bush,
dared challenge this figure as an underestimation and he was thrown out
of his job. He had predicted that the cost might be somewhere from $100
to $200 billion. To quote Lindsey, "My hypothetical estimate got the
annual cost about right. But I misjudged an important factor: how long
we would be involved." Five years after his ouster, he believes that
"one of the reasons the administration's efforts are so unpopular that
they chose not to engage in an open public discussion of what the
consequences might be, including the economic cost."

Just three months after the invasion, The Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace came out with its Policy Brief (no.24, May 2003),
"Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building." The
very opening paragraph said: "The real test for the success of the U.S.
preemptive war against the regime of Saddam Hussein is whether or not
Iraq can now be rebuilt after the war. Few national undertakings are as
complex, costly, and time consuming as reconstructing the governing
institutions of foreign societies. Even a combination of unsurpassed
military power and abundant wealth does not guarantee success, let alone
quick results. Historically, nation-building attempts by outside powers
are notably mainly for their bitter disappointments, not their triumphs."

The authors of the Policy Brief—Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper—pointed out
that the United States, till then, had used its armed forces in foreign
lands on more than 200 occasions and its nation-building record had been
utterly dismal. What they said has proved to be prophetic: "The internal
characteristics of Iraqi society will severely test Washington's
resolve, skill, and patience in pursuing its declared goal of political
transformation. With a population of 24 million, Iraq is larger than any
of the Latin American countries where the United States has attempted
nation building." With its deep ethnic divisions, the internal situation
would be too complicated for the Americans to deal with. "Outside
efforts to bridge such ethnic and religious divisions through
reconciliation have a poor track record—as has been demonstrated in the
former Yugoslavia." It would be extremely difficult "to align U.S.
strategic interests with those of the Iraqi elite and public."

Warning the hawks in the Bush administration, the authors said, "they
should reconsider their position in light of the sobering lessons from
American nation building during the past century. Aside from an overall
low rate of success, such unilateral undertakings have led to the
creation and maintenance surrogate regimes that have eventually mutated
into military dictatorships and corrupt autocracies. Repeating these
mistakes in Iraq, especially after President Bush's declaration of
American resolve to build democracy there, would be a tragedy for the
Iraqi people and a travesty of American democratic ideals."

Stiglitz and Bilmes have come out with a mass of data in their three
hundred and odd page book, underlining that Pei and Kasper were
perfectly right and Bush and his team completely wrong in going ahead
with their criminal act of invading and devastating Iraq. In the
process, they have harmed the very American people that entrusted them
with the reins of the state. Stiglitz and Bilmes correctly assert: "By
now it is clear that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake.
Nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have been killed, and more than 58,000 have
been wounded, injured, or fallen seriously ill... One hundred thousand
U.S. soldiers have returned from the war suffering from mental health
disorders, a significant fraction of which will be chronic afflictions.
Miserable though Saddam Hussein's regime was, life is actually worse for
the Iraqi people now. The country's roads, schools, hospitals, homes,
and museums have been destroyed and its citizens have less access to
electricity and water than before the war. Sectarian violence is rife.
Iraq's chaos has made the country a magnet for terrorists of all
stripes. The notion that invading Iraq would bring democracy and
catalyze change in the Middle East now seems like a fantasy. When the
full price of the war has been paid, trillions of dollars will have been
added to our national debt. Invading Iraq has also driven up oil prices.
In these and other ways, the war has weakened our economy."

Till now, America has spent $600 billion on Iraq war. Stiglitz and
Bilmes have calculated, after taking into account both direct and
indirect, open and hidden, expenses and assuming that the war is going
to last a bit longer, that it will cost $3 trillion or, maybe, $4
trillion. Countering the argument that this is a very small sum for the
largest economy in the world, they say, "The issue is not whether
America can afford three trillion dollars. With a typical American
household income in 2006 just short of $70,000, we have far more than we
need to get by. Even if we threw 10 percent of that away, we would still
be no worse off than we were in 1995—when we were a prosperous and
well-off country. There is no risk that a trillion dollars or two or
three will bankrupt the country. The relevant question is a rather
different one: What could we have done with a trillion dollars or two or
three? What have we had to sacrifice? What is, to use the economists'
jargon, the opportunity cost?"

The opportunity cost of the Iraq war has been enormous. With the money
being spent on Iraq war, America could have easily solved its social
security problem at least for the next half a century. With one trillion
dollars, it could have constructed as many as 8 million new dwelling
units, employed 13 million more school teachers, provided elementary
education to 120 million kids or health insurance to 530 million
children for one year or granted scholarships to 43 million students for
four years. Multiply these figures by 3 and you get the opportunity cost
of $3 trillion to be gobbled up by the Iraq war. In a recent article in
/The Guardian/ (April 6), Stiglitz and Bilmes, while refuting Bush's
claim that the $3 trillion dollar estimate of the total cost may be
exaggerated, assert that it is "in fact, conservative. Even the
president would have to admit that the $50 to $60 billion estimate given
by the administration before the war was wildly off the mark; there is
little reason to have confidence in their arithmetic. They admit to a
cost so far of $600 billion."

Explaining why their estimates are different, they state: "Our numbers
differ from theirs for three reasons: first, we are estimating the total
cost of the war, under alternative conservative scenarios, derived from
the defence department and congressional budget office. We are not
looking at McCain's 100-year scenario- we assume that we are there, in
the diminished strength, only through to 2017. But neither are we
looking at a scenario that sees our troops pulled out within six months.
With operational spending going on at $12 billion a month, and with
every year costing more than the last, it is easy to come to a total
operational cost that is double the $600 billion already spent.

"Second, we include war expenditures hidden elsewhere in the budget, and
budgetary expenditures that we would have to incur in the future even if
we left tomorrow. Most important of these are future costs of caring for
the 40%of returning veterans that are likely to suffer from disabilities
(in excess of $600 billion; second world war veterans' costs didn't peak
until 1993), and restoring the military to its prewar strength. If you
include interest, and interest on the interest - with all of the war
debt financed - the budgetary costs quickly mount.

"Finally, our $3 trillion dollars estimate also includes costs to the
economy that go beyond the budget, for instance, the cost of caring for
the huge number of returning disabled veterans that go beyond the costs
borne by the federal government - in one out of five families with a
serious disability, someone has to give up a job. The macro-economic
costs are even larger. Almost every expert we have talked to agrees that
the war has had something to do with the rise in the price of oil; it
was not just an accident that oil prices began to soar at the same time
as the war began."

The Iraq war has adversely impacted not only the two sides involved in
it but also the world at large, especially the developing nations. As a
result of the war, while the demand for oil has increased, its supply
has declined as the production in Iraq has declined. At the time of the
invasion of Iraq, oil was selling $25 a barrel but now it can be had for
around$100 a barrel. In the years to come, it may go up to $125 a
barrel. The increasing price of oil has strengthened inflationary
pressures around the world. Besides, the production of ethanol and other
bio-fuels is being undertaken by diverting corn, sugarcane, soybeans and
other crops to it. This, in turn, contributes to the worldwide growing
shortage of food grains and pushes up the prices. The higher oil prices
have inflicted a direct cost to the world economy to the tune of roughly
$1.1 trillion.

Since the beginning of the Iraq war, America's national debt has gone up
by $2.5 trillion, out of which $1 trillion has been due to the Iraq war.
Bush, after coming to power, reduced the tax liabilities of the upper
income group people. It means the burden of meeting the war expenditures
has fallen more on the people at large. By 2017, it is estimated that
the national debt will increase by $2 trillion.

There are other adverse consequences that defy quantification. For
example, the morale of the troops is very low, there is a shortage of
wherewithal and there is a nationwide discontent because of insufficient
attention to the wounded soldiers. So far as the Iraqis are concerned,
more than a million people have perished. There is no law and order
worth the name. Anarchy reins supreme. As many as 45 per cent of the
families in Baghdad have lost their one or more members. There is a
large-scale displacement of the population. To quote Stiglitz and
Bilmes, "In human terms, it is the loss of life and the destruction of
Iraqi society that is the most egregious...

"For most Iraqis, daily life has become unbearable—to the point that
those who can afford to leave their country have done so. By September
2007, a stunning 4.6 million people—one of every seven Iraqis—had been
uprooted from their homes. This is the largest migration of people in
the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948."

As many as 2.4 million Iraqis have migrated to foreign lands, especially
Syria and Jordan, who are also feeling the strain. In all 20 per cent of
the pre-war population is displaced. Those who are left behind have
neither drinking water nor electricity. Schools and colleges do not
function because most of the teachers have either fled or been killed.
Hospitals suffer from lack of beds, doctors, nursing staff and medicines.

Iraq's museums have been looted and historical treasures have been taken
away. Valuable manuscripts have been lost, stolen or destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens says of Baghdad: "This is one of the greatest
centres of learning and culture in history. It was here that some of the
lost works of Aristotle and other Greeks... were preserved,
retranslated, and transmitted via Andalusia back to the the ignorant
"Christian" West." Naomi Klein, in her "The Shock Doctrine," has given
the details of the plunder and has also narrated how Iraqi economy has
been destroyed to make it pasture for the MNCs.

gmishra@girishmishra.com

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Iraq War Costs Skyrocketing, But Congress Unable to Scrutinize Spending

April 11, 2008 By *Jason Leopold*

Jason Leopold's ZSpace Page </zspace/jasonleopold1>

Nearly all of the $516 billion allocated by Congress to fund the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq has come in the form of emergency spending
requests, a method the White House has abused, depriving Congress the
ability to scrutinize how the Pentagon spends money in the so-called
global war on terror. The use of emergency supplemental bills to fund
the wars has likely resulted in the waste of billions of taxpayer
dollars, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability
Office.

Dozens of emergency funding requests that Congress has approved since
2001 is unprecedented compared with past military conflicts when war
funding went through the normal appropriations process. As of March, the
GAO said average monthly costs to fund military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan has reached roughly $12.3 billion, $10 billion for Iraq
alone, more than double what it cost to fund the war in 2004.

"Over 90% of [the Department of Defense] funds were provided as
emergency funds in supplemental or additional appropriations; the
remainder were provided in regular defense bills or in transfers from
regular appropriations," the report said. "Emergency funding is exempt
from ceilings applying to discretionary spending in Congress's annual
budget resolutions. Some Members have argued that continuing to fund
ongoing operations in supplementals reduces congressional oversight."

Vernonique de Rugy, a senior research fellow and budget scholar at the
Mercatus Center at George Mason University, said funding the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars through emergency legislation is troubling because the
money "doesn't get counted in deficit projections, making it hard to
track the real cost of the war and effectively removing any upper limits
on spending for the war."

"Even seven years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, and five
years after the start of the war in Iraq, Congress and the president are
still using "emergency" funding bills to cover costs, rather than going
through the regular appropriations process," said de Rugy, who just
published an article on the issue, "The Trillion-Dollar War," in the May
issue of Reason magazine. "While other wars have initially been funded
using emergency supplementals, they have quickly been incorporated into
the regular budget. Never before has emergency supplemental spending
been used to fund an entire war and over the course of so many years."

Most troubling about this trend, the GAO said in a report issued in
February, is that while the Pentagon's budget requests has steadily
increased annually the reasons the Defense Department has cited to
explain its skyrocketing costs "do not appear to be enough to explain
the size of and continuation of increases."

"Although some of the factors behind the rapid increase in DOD funding
are known — the growing intensity of operations, additional force
protection gear and equipment, substantial upgrades of equipment,
converting units to modular configurations, and new funding to train and
equip Iraqi security forces — these elements" fail to justify the
increase, the GAO report stated, adding that "little of the $93 billion
DOD increase between [fiscal year] 2004 and [fiscal year] 2007 appears
to reflect changes in the number of deployed personnel."

Furthermore, a $70 billion "placeholder" request included in the fiscal
year 2009 budget that the Pentagon says will be used to finance
operations in Iraq does not include any details on how the money will be
spent "making it impossible to estimate its allocation," according to
the report.

The GAO added the Pentagon has used emergency supplemental requests to
get Congress to fund equipment and vehicle upgrades that would otherwise
come out of the Pentagon's annual budget. The Pentagon has succeeded
largely due to a new way it now defines the war on terror.

"Although some of this increase may reflect additional force protection
and replacement of "stressed" equipment, much may be in response to
[Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England's new guidance to fund
requirements for the "longer war" rather than DOD's traditional
definition of war costs as strictly related to immediate war needs," the
GAO report says, adding that Congress must immediately begin to demand a
more transparent accounting of Pentagon emergency spending in order to
put an end to the agency's accounting chicanery.

"For example, the Navy initially requested $450 million for six EA-18G
aircraft, a new electronic warfare version of the F-18, and the Air
Force $389 million for two Joint Strike Fighters, an aircraft just
entering production; such new aircraft would not be delivered for about
three years and so could not be used meet immediate war needs," the GAO
report said.

On Wednesday, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee,
Gen. Richard Cody, the Army's vice chief of staff, said the military
will soon run out of cash if lawmakers don't act to approve a $102
billion emergency supplemental spending bill to continue funding
military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We start running out of military pay for our force in June, we start
running out of operational dollars that we can flow to the force in
early July," Cody said. "It's all about time now. Those will be the
consequences of not getting the supplemental."

The GAO generally agrees with Cody, but said the Pentagon could dip into
its budget and transfer funds to finance operations in Iraq until late
September or early October, which would give Congress more time to
scrutinize the emergency funding request.

Still, these dire warnings from Bush administration officials and
military personnel about imminent funding shortfalls have become routine
since Democrats won control of Congress in November 2006. Last year,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates threatened to fire more than 200,000
Defense Department employees and terminate contracts with defense
contractors because Congressional Democrats did not immediately approve
a spending package to continue funding the Iraq war. The GAO and the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) advised Congress that Gates could tap
into the Pentagon's $471 billion budget to fund the war while Congress
continued to debate the merits of giving the White House another "blank
check" for Iraq.

Government auditors have said that these predictions are untrue and have
been cited publicly by the White House to prod Congress into quickly
passing legislation to appropriate funds. Republican lawmakers and
administration officials have also said failure by Democrats to fund the
war is tantamount to not supporting the troops. But the rhetoric has
been enough to spook Democrats into passing the emergency funding
requests, often without being aware of how the money is being spent.

Other federal agencies, including the Congressional Research Service
(CRS) and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), have testified to
Congress about the limited transparency in DOD's emergency budget requests.

"While DOD has provided considerably more justification material for its
war cost requests beginning with the [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental,
many questions remain difficult to answer — such as the effect of
changes in troop levels on costs — and there continue to be unexplained
discrepancies in DOD's war cost reports, the GAO report stated.

That led the GAO to draft a letter to Congress March 17, saying the $108
billion the Pentagon has recently requested is based on "unreliable"
financial data and should be considered an "approximation," which,
technically, could be interpreted to mean the Pentagon's accounting
methods underestimated the cost of the war.

"Over the years, we have conducted a series of reviews examining funding
and reported obligations for military operations in support of [the
global war on terror], the letter, addressed to Congressional
committees, says. "Our prior work has found the data in DOD's monthly
Supplemental and Cost of War Execution Report to be of questionable
reliability. Consequently, we are unable to ensure that DOD's reported
obligations for [the global war on terror] are complete, reliable, and
accurate, and they therefore should be considered approximations...GAO
has assessed the reliability of DOD's obligation data and found
significant problems, such that these data may not accurately reflect
the true dollar value of obligations [for the global war on terror.]"

A Pentagon spokesman did not return calls for comment. But a GAO
spokeswoman said the DOD has been struggling with "deficiencies in the
Pentagon's financial management system" that contributed to the
unreliable data. She would not elaborate.

Although studies have surfaced stating that the cost of the Iraq war
could soar past $2 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office said trying
to estimate future costs for the war is difficult "because DOD has
provided little detailed information on costs incurred to date."

"The Administration has not provided any long-term estimates of costs
despite a statutory reporting requirement that the President submit a
cost estimate for [fiscal year] 2006-2011 that was enacted in 2004," the
GAO said.

/ /

/Jason Leopold is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie,"
a memoir. Visit www.newsjunkiebook.com <http://www.newsjunkiebook.com/>
for a preview. He is also a two-time winner of the Project Censored
award, most recently, in 2007, for an investigative story related to
Halliburton's work in Iran. He was recently named the recipient of the
Military Religious Freedom Foundation's Thomas Jefferson Award for a
series of stories he wrote that exposed how soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan have been pressured to accept fundamentalist Christianity.
Leopold is working on a new nonprofit online publication, expected to
launch soon./

No to McCain

THE ABSURD TIMES

One of you posted an excellent comment and I thought it deserved a more prominent place.

I agree with all of it, although much of it has to do with his murders. The most absurd thing about McCain, as our contirbuter notes, is his own decision, we are told, to remain a prisoner of war. What is to stop him from saying "I did it, why not other U.S. Citizens?"

My comment is about McCain. In Viet Nam he was one of those fly boys who dropped millions of bombs on the north VN population, right? And they did it for quite a while with impunity until finally China or russia supplied the north with missles to bring down the bombers, right? And so they got a few prisoner airboys before they changed strategy to high altitude bombing. Since they were just bombing civilians and not strategic targets, that worked fine. So, how does that make him a war hero??? Then he doesn't have sense enough to use his get out of jail card. Does that show good judgement?? He speaks with this phoney soft voice while privately he is known to have anger management issues.

Meanwhile, he is an article about another Iriqi leader who actually deserves respect. When Saddam learned that his eldest son killed this man's father, Saddam almost killed him (Uday) and said "You might just as well killed me." This is the one Shia leader who did not hide out in Iran.

Muqtada al-Sadr and the American Dilemma in Iraq

April 09, 2008 By *Patrick Cockburn*
Source: TomDispatch <http://www.tomdispatch.com>

Patrick Cockburn's ZSpace Page </zspace/patrickcockburn>

Join ZSpace <https://www.zcommunications.org/zsustainers/signup>

Muqtada al-Sadr is the most important and surprising figure to emerge in
Iraq since the U.S. invasion. He is the Messianic leader of the
religious and political movement of the impoverished Shia underclass
whose lives were ruined by a quarter of a century of war, repression,
and sanctions.

From the moment he unexpectedly appeared in the dying days of Saddam
Hussein's regime, U.S. emissaries and Iraqi politicians underestimated
him. So far from being the "firebrand cleric" as the Western media often
described him, he often proved astute and cautious in leading his
followers.

During the battle for Najaf with U.S. Marines in 2004, the U.S. "surge"
of 2007, and the escalating war with the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council,
he generally sought compromise rather than confrontation. So far from
being the inexperienced young man whom his critics portrayed -- when he
first appeared they denigrated him as a /zatut/ (an "ignorant child," in
Iraqi dialect) -- he was a highly experienced political operator who had
worked in his father's office in Najaf since he was a teenager. He also
had around him activist clerics, of his own age or younger, who had
hands-on experience under Saddam of street politics within the Shia
community. His grasp of what ordinary Iraqis felt was to prove far surer
than that of the politicians isolated in the Green Zone in Baghdad.

*A Kleptocracy Comparable to the Congo*

Mass movements led by Messianic leaders have a history of flaring up
unexpectedly and then subsiding into insignificance. This could have
happened to Muqtada and the Sadrists but did not, because their
political and religious platform had a continuous appeal for the Shia
masses. From the moment Saddam was overthrown, Muqtada rarely deviated
from his open opposition to the U.S. occupation, even when a majority of
the Shia community was prepared to cooperate with the occupiers.

As the years passed, however, disillusion with the occupation grew among
the Shia until, by September 2007, an opinion poll showed that 73% of
Shia thought that the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq made the security
situation worse, and 55% believed their departure would make a
Shia-Sunni civil war less likely. The U.S. government, Iraqi
politicians, and the Western media habitually failed to recognize the
extent to which hostility to the occupation drove Iraqi politics and, in
the eyes of Iraqis, delegitimized the leaders associated with it.

All governments in Baghdad failed after 2003. Almost no Iraqis supported
Saddam Hussein as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad. Even his supposedly
loyal Special Republican Guard units dissolved and went home. Iraqis
were deeply conscious that their country sat on some of the world's
largest oil reserves, but Saddam Hussein's Inspector Clouseau-like
ability to make catastrophic errors in peace and war had reduced the
people to a state in which their children were stunted because they did
not get enough to eat.

The primal rage of the dispossessed in Iraq against the powers-that-be
exploded in the looting of Baghdad when the old regime fell, and the
same fury possessed Muqtada's early supporters. Had life become easier
in Shia Iraq in the coming years, this might have undermined the Sadrist
movement. Instead, people saw their living standards plummet as
provision of food rations, clean water, and electricity faltered.
Saddam's officials were corrupt enough, but the new government cowering
in the Green Zone rapidly turned into a kleptocracy comparable to
Nigeria or the Congo. Muqtada sensed the loathing with which the
government was regarded, and dodged in and out of government, enjoying
some of the fruits of power while denouncing those who held it.

Muqtada's political intelligence is undoubted, but the personality of
this highly secretive man is difficult to pin down. While his father and
elder brothers lived he was in their shadow; after they were
assassinated in 1999 he had every reason to stress his lack of ability
or ambition in order to give the /mukhabarat/ [Saddam Hussein's secret
police] less reason to kill him. As the son and son-in-law of two of
Saddam Hussein's most dangerous opponents, he was a prime suspect and
his every move was watched.

When Saddam fell, Muqtada stepped forward to claim his forbears'
political inheritance and consciously associated himself with them on
every possible occasion. Posters showed Muqtada alongside Sadr I and
Sadr II [Muqtada's father-in-law and father, both assassinated by
Saddam] against a background of the Iraqi flag. There was more here than
a leader exploiting his connection to a revered or respected parent.
Muqtada persistently emphasized the Sadrist ideological legacy:
puritanical Shia Islam mixed with anti-imperialism and populism.

*Riding the Tiger of the Sadrist Movement*

The first time I thought seriously about Muqtada was a grim day in April
2003 when I heard that he was being accused of killing a friend of mine,
Sayyid Majid al-Khoei, that intelligent and able man with whom I had
often discussed the future of Iraq. Whatever the involvement of Muqtada
himself, which is a matter of dispute, the involvement of the Sadrist
supporters in the lynching is proven and was the start of a pattern that
was to repeat itself over the years.

Muqtada was always a man riding a tiger, sometimes presiding over,
sometimes controlling the mass movement he nominally led. His words and
actions were often far apart. He appealed for Shia unity with the Sunni
against the occupation, yet after the bombing of the Shia shrine in
Samarra in February 2006, he was seen as an ogre by the Sunni,
orchestrating the pogroms against them and failing to restrain the death
squads of the Mehdi Army. The excuse that it was "rogue elements" among
his militiamen who were carrying out this slaughter is not convincing,
because the butchery was too extensive and too well organized to be the
work of only marginal elements. But the Sadrists and the Shia in general
could argue that it was not they who had originally taken the offensive
against the Sunni, and the Shia community endured massacres at the hands
of al-Qaeda for several years before their patience ran out.

Muqtada had repeatedly demanded that Sunni political and religious
leaders unequivocally condemn al-Qaeda in Iraq's horrific attacks on
Shia civilians if he was to cooperate with them against the occupation.
They did not do so, and this was a shortsighted failure on their part,
since the Shia, who outnumbered the Sunni Arabs three to one in Iraq,
controlled the police and much of the army. Their retaliation, when it
came, was bound to be devastating. Muqtada was criticized for not doing
more, but neither he, nor anybody else could have stopped the killing at
the height of the battle for Baghdad in 2006. The Sunni and Shia
communities were both terrified, and each mercilessly retaliated for the
latest atrocity against their community. "We try to punish those who
carry out evil deeds in the name of the Mehdi Army," says Hussein Ali,
the former Mehdi Army leader. "But there are a lot of Shia regions that
are not easy to control and we ourselves, speaking frankly, are
sometimes frightened by these great masses of people."

American officials and journalists seldom showed much understanding of
Muqtada, even after [U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority head] Paul
Bremer's disastrous attempt to crush him [in 2004]. There were
persistent attempts to marginalize him or keep him out of government
instead of trying to expand the Iraqi government's narrow support base
to include the Sadrists. The first two elected Shia prime ministers,
Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki, came under intense pressure from
Washington to sever or limit their connection with Muqtada. But
government officials were not alone in being perplexed by the young
cleric. In a lengthy article on him published in its December 4, 2006,
issue, /Newsweek/ admitted that "Muqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding
America's fate in Iraq." But the best the magazine could do to assist
its readers in understanding Muqtada was to suggest that they should
"think of him as a young Mafia don."

Of course, Muqtada was the complete opposite to the type of Iraqi leader
who proponents of the war in Washington had suggested would take over
from Saddam Hussein. Instead of the smooth, dark-suited,
English-speaking exiles who the White House had hoped would turn Iraq
into a compliant U.S. ally, Muqtada looked too much like a younger
version of Ayatollah Khomeini.

Muqtada epitomized the central dilemma of the United States in Iraq,
which it has never resolved. The problem was that the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein and his Sunni regime was bound to be followed by
elections that would produce a government dominated by the Shia allied
to the Kurds. It soon became evident that the Shia parties that were
going to triumph in any election would be Islamic parties, and some
would have close links to Iran.

The Arab Sunni states were aghast at the sight of Iran's defeat in the
Iran-Iraq war being reversed, and spoke of a menacing "Shia axis"
developing in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Much of this was ignorance and
paranoia on the part of the Arab leaders. Had the Iranians been tempted
to make Iraq a client state they would have found the country as prickly
a place for Iranians as it was to be for Americans. It was the U.S.
attempt to create an anti-Iranian Iraq that was to play into Iranian
hands and produce the very situation that Washington was trying to avoid.

The more Washington threatened air strikes on Iran because of its
nuclear program, the more the Iranians sought to make sure that it had
the potential to strike back at American forces in Iraq. Before he was
executed, Sadr I believed that he had been let down by Iran; Sadr II had
bad relations with Tehran; and at first Muqtada denounced his Shia
opponents in SCIRI and the Marji'iyyah as being Iranian stooges. But
American pressure meant that the Sadrists had to look to Iran for help,
and in a military confrontation the Mehdi Army saw Iran as an essential
source of weapons and military expertise.

*The New Iraqi Political Landscape*

On reappearing after his four-month disappearance in May 2007, Muqtada
called for a united front of Sunni and Shia and identified the U.S.
occupation and al-Qaeda in Iraq as the enemies of both communities. The
call was probably sincere, but it was also too late. Baghdad was now
largely a Shia city, and people were too frightened to go back to their
old homes. The U.S. "surge" had contributed to the sharp drop in
sectarian killings, but it was also true that the Shia had won and there
were few mixed areas left.

The U.S. commander General David Petraeus claimed that security was
improving, but only a trickle of Iraqis who had fled their homes were
returning. Muqtada was the one Shia leader capable of uniting with the
Sunni on a nationalist platform, but the Sunni Arabs of Iraq had never
accepted that their rule had ended. If Sunni and Shia could not live on
the same street, they could hardly share a common identity.

The political and military landscape of Iraq changed in 2007 as the
Sunni population turned on al-Qaeda. This started before the "surge,"
but it was still an important development. Al-Qaeda's massive suicide
bombs targeting civilians had been the main fuel for Shia-Sunni
sectarian warfare since 2003. The Sunni Arabs and many of the insurgent
groups had turned against al-Qaeda after it tried to monopolize power
within the Sunni community at the end of 2006 by declaring the Islamic
State of Iraq. Crucial in the change was al-Qaeda's attempt to draft one
son from every Sunni family into its ranks. Sunni with lowly jobs with
the government such as garbage collectors were killed.

By the fall of 2007 the U.S. military command in Baghdad was trumpeting
successes over al-Qaeda, saying it had been largely eliminated in Anbar,
Baghdad, and Diyala. But the Sunni Arab fighters, by now armed and paid
for by the United States, did not owe their prime loyalty to the Iraqi
government. Muqtada might speak of new opportunities for pan-Iraqi
opposition to the U.S. occupation, but many anti-al-Qaeda Sunni fighters
had quite different ideas. They wanted to reverse the Shia victory in
the 2006 battle of Baghdad.

A new breed of American-supported Sunni warlords was emerging. One of
them, Abu Abed, is a former member of the insurgent Islamic Army. He
operates in the Amariya district of west Baghdad, where he is a
commander of the U.S.-backed Amariya Knights, whom the U.S. calls
Concerned Citizens. His stated objectives show that the rise of the new
Sunni militias may mark only a new stage in a sectarian civil war.
"Amariya is just the beginning," says Abu Abed. "After we finish with
al-Qaida here, we will turn towards our main enemy, the Shia militias. I
will liberate Jihad [the mixed Sunni-Shia area near Amariya taken over
by the Mehdi Army], then Saadiya and the whole of west Baghdad."

The al-Sadr family has an extraordinary record of resistance to Saddam
Hussein, for which they paid a heavy price. One of the gravest errors in
Iraq by the United States was to try to marginalize Muqtada and his
movement. Had he been part of the political process from the beginning,
the chances of creating a peaceful, prosperous Iraq would have been
greater.

In any real accommodation between Shia and Sunni, the Sadrists must play
a central role. Muqtada probably represented his constituency of
millions of poor Shia better than anybody else could have done. But he
never wholly controlled his own movement, and never created as
well-disciplined a force as Hezbollah in Lebanon. None of his ambitions
for reconciliation with the Sunni could take wing unless the Mehdi Army
ceased to be identified with death squads and sectarian cleansing.

The war in Iraq has gone on longer than World War I and, while violence
diminished in the second half of 2007, nothing has been resolved. The
differences between Shia and Sunni, the disputes within the respective
communities, and the antagonism against the U.S. occupation are all as
great as ever. The only way the Sadrists and the Mehdi Army could create
confidence among the Sunni that Muqtada meant what he said when he
called for unity, would be for them to be taken back voluntarily into
the areas in Baghdad and elsewhere from which they have been driven. But
there is no sign of this happening. The disintegration of Iraq has
probably gone too far for the country to exist as anything more than a
loose federation.

/Patrick Cockburn is the Iraq correspondent for The Independent in
London. He has visited Iraq countless times since 1977 and was recipient
of the 2004 Martha Gellhorn Prize for war reporting as well as the 2006
James Cameron Memorial Award. His book *The Occupation: War and
Resistance in Iraq*, was short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle
Award in 2007. This essay is the last chapter in his new book, Muqtada:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416551476/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>,
just published by Scribner./

*From Muqtada
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416551476/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20> by
Patrick Cockburn. Copyright © 2008 by Patrick Cockburn. Reprinted by
permission of Scribner, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.*

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which
offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom
Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, /co-founder of the American
Empire Project <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>/ and author of
/The End of Victory Culture
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>
(University of Massachusetts Press), which has just been thoroughly
updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's
crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq./]

free speech?

the absurd times

THE ABSURD TIMES

This is a tricky issue for me. I do like Air-America, but think they act like Nazis (or corporate Amerika) when they suspended radio host Randi Rhodes for the bit attatched above. I tried to post it as a video to show that it happened at a nightclum, not on the job, but it was over 12 MB and the sound isn't very good. Even this version, edited for sound, isn't very clear -- you may have to run your equalizer flat to really hear it. Essentially, she is doing standup, long straight hair with bangs, kinda buck teeth, and really having fun. You really need to hear the entire clip before you decide anything, but it seems to me entirely within the scope of her rights as she did not use these particular words on the air or as part of her job.

Any Reactions?

Charles

Chalabi, Christ, Omaba, Richardson

THE ABSURD TIMES

THE ABSURD TIMES

Well, just too many wierd things have been going on to digest.

1) Bill Clinton called Bill Richardson a "Judas" for endorsing Obama. Can anyone continue the metaphor or similie? Who, for example, becomes Christ in this context?

2) Conservative Radio Hosts have been encouraging listeners to vote for Clinton in the primaries.

3) Kieth Olbermann managed to get Wal-Mart to behave properly after listing them on his "Worst Persons" list daily until they did. It had to do with ... never mind, they screw their own employees on health care.

4) 81% of Americans think Amerika is going the the wrong direction. Really?

5) You may remember that I told many of you in 2001 about Chalabi. Now it is laid out, below:

Click here </doc/20080421/roston> to return to the browser-optimized
version of this page.

This article can be found on the web at
*http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/roston*

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chalabi's Lobby

by ARAM ROSTON

[from the April 21, 2008 issue]

With the invasion of Iraq still three years in the future, Ahmad Chalabi
would step into the lobby of the modern granite office building at 1801
K Street in Washington--the heart of the nation's lobbying corridor. He
would walk past the security guard and ride the elevator up to the ninth
floor. The ride was, in some sense, one small vertical leg of Chalabi's
journey back to Iraq. This particular way point was the office belonging
to Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey (BKSH), one of the most powerful
lobbying firms in the United States, owned by public relations
powerhouse Burson-Marsteller.

No one could have guessed, back in 2000, what would come of Chalabi's
efforts in Washington. Few people knew who "eoconservatives" were, and
even those who did could not have grasped their remarkable affection for
and loyalty to Chalabi, a shrewd Iraqi Arab from a family of Shiite
bankers. No one could have predicted that Chalabi's group, the Iraqi
National Congress (INC), would go on to push false stories about terror
and weapons of mass destruction with such great success as the group
campaigned against Saddam Hussein's quite sadistic regime. Nor,
certainly, was it possible to foresee that the massive propaganda
campaign run by Chalabi to encourage the United States to invade Iraq
would be fully paid for with US taxpayer funds.

One thing people did know, even in 2000, was that Ahmad Chalabi, whose
thickly accented English seemed only to enhance his charisma, had lots
and lots of friends on Capitol Hill. Congress had passed the Iraq
Liberation Act in 1998, written largely to achieve Chalabi's vision for
toppling Saddam. And every year Congress was earmarking money for him.
But he had opponents, too, in the government: American diplomats who
were skeptical of him, despite his charm and his claims of inside
knowledge about Iraq. These Americans knew all about his murky past: a
bank embezzlement conviction in absentia in the Kingdom of Jordan years
earlier. They knew that the Central Intelligence Agency considered him a
phony and a liability and, after working with him for years, had cut all
ties with him.

So it is important, when considering Chalabi's relationship with BKSH,
to ponder that this elite firm was hired in part as a result of a feud
in the American government. It was in the late 1990s, when Congress was
earmarking funds for Chalabi's INC and charging the State Department
with spending all the cash, that State enlisted BKSH's services. The
State Department diplomats, under veteran Frank Ricciardone, were among
the skeptics on the subject of Ahmad Chalabi and were concerned about
the accounting challenges posed by their obligation to dole out the
earmarked funds. They figured that through BKSH, they could funnel
support to the INC while complying with Congressional intentions and
normal accounting procedures, and moreover that an American firm could
be controlled and monitored and would have the expertise in PR and
organizing that was necessary. They put a contract out for bid; PR giant
Burson-Marsteller won the award and quickly handed the work over to its
subsidiary BKSH.

BKSH was the lobbying vehicle of the legendary Republican insider
Charles Black Jr., one of "America's foremost Republican political
strategists," according to BKSH. Black, a former adviser to Presidents
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is now a senior adviser to GOP
presidential candidate John McCain, who was himself an early Chalabi
backer with ties to the Iraqi going all the way back to 1991. BKSH,
which represented major defense contractors, governments and
international corporations, was perfectly situated to leverage its
expertise on behalf of the Iraqi National Congress.

In an interview, Charles Black explained that his firm received $200,000
to $300,000 per year from the US government "to promote the INC." Black,
in his pleasant Texas drawl, says the firm did "standard kinds of public
relations and public affairs, setting up seminars, helping them get
speeches covered by the press, press conferences." Black said he
believes his company can take a lot of pride in a strong campaign. "The
whole thing was very successful. The INC became not only well-known, but
I think the message got out there strongly."

Most of BKSH's work for Chalabi was handled by Riva Levinson, a longtime
Capitol Hill lobbyist who quickly became passionate about Chalabi's
cause. "Riva would spend her weekend thinking about, How can I get press
coverage for the INC next week?" Black explained, "and then come in on
Monday morning and schedule a speech or call reporters to get a speech
covered or get Chalabi or the other leaders out to get the message out."
Levinson even spoke out overtly as the INC's spokeswoman, giving
interviews on its behalf.

The State Department's efforts to control Chalabi through
Burson-Marsteller ultimately backfired. In the course of his power
struggle with his State Department patrons over who would control the
Iraqi opposition and the stream of American funding, Chalabi would
frequently criticize both US policy and his Iraqi competitors. The
government would complain to BKSH. "We'd tell him.... And he'd say,
'Fine,' and go say the same thing over again," said Black. "Basically
the US government couldn't make Chalabi do anything he didn't want to
do." So while US taxpayers paid for BKSH's services, the company, from
all appearances, worked for Ahmad Chalabi.

Normally, before campaigning on behalf of a foreign interest (which,
after all, was what Chalabi was), the agent would register under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agents Registration Act. That's required
whenever someone represents a foreign interest in a "political or
quasi-political" way.Examples include groups that at times had been
allied with Chalabi, like Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
and Masoud Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party. But since BKSH was paid
by taxpayer funds through the State Department, it never registered as a
foreign agent. Since it was not technically a "lobbyist" for Chalabi,
even though that is exactly how it was functioning, it never registered
on Capitol Hill either, which would be the norm for a lobbyist. Although
the transaction was not classified or secret, journalists, legislators
and the American public weren't told about it.

T he last week of October 2003 had been particularly gory in Baghdad.
Rockets tore into the Al-Rashid Hotel, where Paul Wolfowitz lay sleeping
on a rare visit. Terrorists destroyed the International Red Cross
compound, and then, on Wednesday, October 29, a land mine gutted a US
Army Abrams tank outside Baghdad, killing two soldiers. That was the day
BKSH and the Iraqi National Congress were honored for their work in the
run-up to the war.

The black-tie award ceremony took place far from the violence in Iraq,
in London, where more than 1,000 of the public relations industry elite
assembled in a ballroom at the luxurious Grosvenor House Hotel. /PR
Week/ hosted the event, its annual awards dinner for public relations
companies. Burson-Marsteller, whose subsidiary BKSH had carried out the
work, was named the winner in the public affairs category. The "Awards
Supplement" of /PR Week/ called BKSH's work a "solid, disciplined
campaign that is totally deserving of this award." "Of particular
importance," said the citation, "was positioning INC founder Dr. Ahmad
Chalabi and other Iraqi opposition spokespeople as authoritative
political leaders." BKSH "compiled intelligence reports, defector
briefings, conferences and seminars.... The PR team also ran a
contact-building programme, focusing on the European Union, Downing
Street, the Foreign Office and MPs in the UK, matched to a US programme
aimed at the White House, the Senate, Congress and the Pentagon."

The awards description does not mention that the fund- ing came entirely
from the US government, let alone that many of the campaign's claims
turned out to be erroneous. But by the time BKSH won the award, the
State Department's funding for the program had stopped, with the
American troops surging through the desert. That did not mean that
BKSH's Iraq work would end. Instead, having eased Chalabi's path to
Baghdad, BKSH would now use its ties to Chalabi to get into the business
of Iraqi reconstruction.

The business elite was eager for a seat at the table. Corporate
executives flocked to conferences, corporations set up divisions to work
on developing business in Iraq, consultancies thrived and newsletters
proliferated to detail legal niceties and dispense advice. BKSH was
going to get in on the ground floor of the industry. Charles Black said
it was a busy time. "After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a lot of US
companies, some of our long-term clients as well as some people who
weren't our clients, came to us and were looking to do business in
Iraq," he explained. The problem, he said, was that BKSH was not "going
to be over there. We didn't have an office over there or have full-time
personnel."

But the Chalabi operation did. Margaret Bartel, an accountant who had
been hired by the State Department to sort out the INC's books and
stayed on to become a key member of the organization's staff, was taking
in Defense Intelligence Agency funds and delivering them to Chalabi's
intelligence operation. Zaab Sethna, Chalabi's press aide, was also in
Iraq. As Black explains it, "Peg was there and Zaab was there, so we
just referred business to them." Bartel and BKSH reached an agreement:
in exchange for a referral fee, BKSH would send clients to Bartel's
consulting company, which would set them up with contacts, influence,
housing, security and everything else they would need to get themselves
started on Iraqi reconstruction. In the gold rush of 1849, they say, it
was not the miners who got rich but the operators who sold the picks and
the shovels and the wagons and the denim. So it was in Iraq, with the
likes of Bartel, the INC and BKSH. The American businessmen would be the
miners taking their chances, and the PR operatives and INC loyalists
were selling the picks and shovels.

In essence, all that was required was a small adjustment in their
previous efforts. BKSH and Chalabi simply pivoted their operation. They
realized that with Chalabi on the ground, they could sell access to him
using the same sophisticated lobbying regime they already had in place.
He had the sort of influence that corporate executives could use in
their search for contracts.

One of the businessmen who signed up for the Iraq package was Albert
Huddleston, an old BKSH customer. "Albert is a longtime client," Black
explained. Huddleston, a Texas oilman and staunch supporter of George W.
Bush, was a Bush "Minor League Pioneer" in the 2000 election, raising
close to $100,000. In the 2004 election he contributed $100,000 to the
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that targeted Senator John
Kerry's campaign by publicizing discredited allegations about his
military service. Huddleston's daughter even worked in the White House
for First Lady Laura Bush.

Huddleston's interest in Iraq was logical and straightforward: he wanted
oil deals, and his company, Hyperion Resources, wanted to be in a good
position when the oil valves finally opened. So it was only natural that
BKSH would refer him to the Chalabi allies who were offering to help
American businessmen. "He was definitely interested in Iraq," Black
recalled, "and we definitely hooked him up with that organization." The
veterans of the PR and lobbying efforts of the INC went to work for
Huddleston. They had focused for years on human rights, democracy and
freedom. Now that the regime of Saddam Hussein was gone, they were
dedicating more and more time to oil and business.

Over time, Sethna became indispensable in these efforts. "Whatever
Albert wanted," recalled one associate, "it was Zaab's mission to go get
it done." In the years after the Iraq invasion, Huddleston did his best
to forge ties in Iraq. What he found at first was that there was no
legitimate government to deal with under the occupation. Paul Bremer had
no authority to negotiate oil deals, because occupying powers can't
legally make decisions about a country's natural resources. And later,
after Bremer left Iraq, the Iraqi government couldn't pass an oil law to
regulate the industry. Nabeel Musawi, a former close Chalabi associate
who later became a member of the temporary National Assembly, remembers
Chalabi, Sethna, Bartel and their guest Huddleston coming to dinner to
petition for help. They wanted to see if Musawi could set up a meeting
between Huddleston and the oil minister. Musawi says he wanted to help
but had to shrug them off because the oil minister was out of town.

Chalabi was well aware of Huddleston's connections to the Bush White
House, and he fawned over the Texan, taking him out and offering him
gifts. Chalabi presented him with a lavish crystal sculpture of an Iraqi
reed house, which had to be shipped back to Texas. But for Huddleston,
the pre-war promise of rosy prospects for American oilmen like himself
was turning out to be an illusion. Chalabi and others had talked about
Iraq's oil and the gushers to come, but despite all the oil under Iraq's
desert, it was unobtainable. Deals made during the occupation would be
shredded later. Huddleston never did make his huge oil strike in Iraq,
despite the money he paid to Chalabi's people there.

Then there is the matter of how much money the American government
itself spent on the services of Chalabi and his INC. One former member
of the INC put it at about $90 million, but a safer and more
conservative estimate of the total American taxpayer subsidy to Chalabi
and his organization is $59 million over the course of eleven years.
This includes an estimated $20 million from the CIA secret budget in the
early 1990s (although it may be far more); add to this $33 million from
the State Department in the years leading up to the war in Iraq and $6
million from the Defense Intelligence Agency starting in 2002.

Chalabi's fortunes have fluctuated wildly since the war. By mid-2006 it
appeared that he had lost any prominent political role in Iraq, although
he held on to his title as chairman of the de-Baathification commission.
A new Iraqi government had finally taken shape, presumably a permanent
one, and Chalabi seemed unsteady as he scrambled for new allies.

He began to make a public comeback, however, in the fall of 2007. One
day in late October, dressed in one of his dark suits, he climbed into a
US Army Black Hawk helicopter in Baghdad. As the rotors of the
helicopter thumped, Chalabi was surrounded by American military men. His
host was Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq.

It had been only thirteen months since a majority of the members of the
Senate Intelligence Committee had found that Chalabi's INC had
"attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq" before the US
invasion "by providing false information."

But Chalabi had survived, and he was soaring over the capital of Iraq in
an American helicopter. The new Iraqi government had appointed him to a
committee to oversee Baghdad's municipal "services." The hope was that
Chalabi, with his organizational skills and his charm, could cut his way
through the Iraqi government's red tape and spur on the efforts of the
beleaguered Health, Electricity, Communications and Transportation
ministries. And the Americans, once again, thought they had found a man
they could work with.