The 228 men and women of the United Iraqi Alliance will choose between Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Ahmed Chalabi as a candidate for prime minister, alliance spokesman Haider Musawi said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
This actually makes a pretty good point. Chalabi had been courting the favors of the U.S. for a long time. A very close friend of mine that used to be with the CIA told me all about how Chalabi tried to cozy up to the State Department, but they (with the CIA's help) pointed out how all of his information didn't really add up. Chalabi wanted the U.S. to invade, so he took it upon himself to provide the U.S. with all kinds of info to support an invasion. The State Department didn't feel like his info was up to snuff, so Chalabi went to the Defense Department, who promptly feel head over heels in love with him. Against the State Dept's (and the CIA's) recommendation, the Defense Department started soaking up every scrap of info that Chalabi dished out, and they started believing it. It was Chalabi and his pals who were the "inside people" who claimed to know where all of the evidence for WMD's could be found, which the Defense Dept. used to help bolster their case for the invasion. I think in hindsight it's pretty clear that the Defense Dapartment had a lot more influence over the Presdent's decisions than the State Dept. did. Now that Chalabi has fallen from grace, the State Dept. and the CIA should be shouting "I told you so" from the rooftops.Zaelath wrote:Oh come on, he did his part in providing a convenient excuse for your invasion, the least you could do would be support his bid for election to the neo-iraqi government.
love how we paid this guy like $350,000 a month or something similar to lie to us and cozy up to Iran. Brilliant work Mr. Cheney.As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”
Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.
