'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

More on Chalabi, Feith, Perle

So at last, administration insiders are starting to talk openly about how it was Douglas Feith and Richard Perle's insistence on installing pro-Israeli con-man Ahmed Chalabi in power in Baghdad that got us into the present mess in Iraq.

Many excellent details on this are in a Knight-Ridder story posted yesterday by JONATHAN S. LANDAY and WARREN P. STROBEL, that I was led to by Juan Cole, whose great website "Informed Comment" is on my template of permanent links to the right.

Landay and Strobel's piece starts:

The small circle of senior civilians in the Defense Department who dominated planning for postwar Iraq failed to prepare for the setbacks that have erupted over the past two months.

The officials didn't develop any real postwar plans because they believed that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops with open arms and Washington could install a favored Iraqi exile leader [Chalabi] as the country's leader. The Pentagon civilians ignored CIA and State Department experts who disputed them, resisted White House pressure to back off from their favored exile leader and when their scenario collapsed amid increasing violence and disorder, they had no backup plan.

I note, just for the record, that I surmised exactly that this was what had happened, as in my June 2 post on JWN when I wrote:

Ahmad Chalabi, the sleazemeister of Jordan's Petra Bank scandal, has now been completely discredited on two key claims he made when he successfully "sold" himself and his ambitions for Iraq to Bombs-Away Don in the months leading up to the US invasion.

The first of these was that he had extensive networks of supporters inside Iraq who would rise joyfully to greet him and his US military pals as "liberators" when they entered Iraq.

The second was that he could provide to the US and their British allies insider information (presumably, from members of those same "networks"?) extensive and reliable details of many aspects of Saddam Hussein's very advanced and dangerous WMD programs...

[A]s Iraq turns into more and more of a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Bush administration (see Chalabi false claim #1 above), then the questioning inside the US as to "How on earth did our country get into this mess in Iraq?" will evidently become more pointed. (Think Gulf of Tonkin.)

At which point, the character of the so-called "evidence" on Saddam's WMD programs will inevitably come under greater and greater scrutiny.

Meanwhile, of course, the COST to the US taxpayer of sustaining the large-scale military occupation inside Iraq will become far, far higher than Wolfowitz and Co. had projected-- not just because of the size of the occupation force required and the length of its stay (reason for both of which being Chalabi false claim #1), but also because of the reluctance of other powers to join in an occupation venture which was launched on the basis of such inaccurate and deliberately manipulated "evidence" about the alleged WMD programs.

Anyway, enough of me noting my own prescience here. Landay and Strobel have started to compile the evidence on all this. They write that they based their story on interviews "more than a dozen" interviews with current and former officials. Here's some more of what they write:

The Pentagon planning group, directed by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, the department's No. 3 official, included hard-line conservatives who had long advocated using the American military to overthrow Saddam. Its day-to-day boss was William Luti, a former Navy officer who worked for Vice President Dick Cheney before joining the Pentagon.

The Pentagon group insisted on doing it its way because it had a visionary strategy that it hoped would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies. The problem was that officials at the State Department and CIA thought the vision was badly flawed and impractical, so the Pentagon planners simply excluded their rivals from involvement.

Feith, Luti and their advisers wanted to put Ahmad Chalabi - the controversial Iraqi exile leader of a coalition of opposition groups - in power in Baghdad. The Pentagon planners were convinced that Iraqis would warmly welcome the American-led coalition and that Chalabi, who boasted of having a secret network inside and outside the regime, and his supporters would replace Saddam and impose order.

Feith, in a series of responses Friday to written questions, denied that the Pentagon wanted to put Chalabi in charge. But Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, who at the time was the chairman of the Defense Policy Board - an influential group of outside advisers to the Pentagon - and is close to Feith and Luti, acknowledged in an interview that installing Chalabi was the plan.

It's a great piece. Go read it! And thanks so much, Juan, for your ever-eagle eye.