You know, I've honestly had several people ask me if my "rdb" meant "red-diaper baby."
No lie.
Posted on 05/21/2004 9:16:55 PM PDT by Destro
Busted neo-con icon
Published: May 22 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: May 22 2004 5:00
The spectacular rise and sudden downfall of Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the Pentagon ideologues who launched the war in Iraq and saw him as its future leader, would look Shakespearean in its plot development were it not so shabby, and the irreducible reality of Iraq not so bloody and still so distant from catharsis.
Front pages across the world illustrated the drama through the splintered glass of a framed portrait of Mr Chalabi, smashed after US troops raided his Baghdad house on Thursday. As the ghost of Hamlet's father put it in a different context: "Oh what a falling off was there!"
Mr Chalabi's recent history in many ways encapsulates the delusionary nature of the US adventure in Iraq - not least because it was he who fed these delusions to his patrons at the Pentagon. Some of the most alarming stories the Bush administration passed on to its allies as intelligence - such as the one about Saddam Hussein's mobile biological weapons laboratories - were the fabrications of defectors supplied on demand by Mr Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC). Colin Powell, the US secretary of state who repeated these assertions to the United Nations Security Council as justification for the war, earlier this month described that particular information as "deliberately misleading".
Mr Chalabi's claim that Iraqis would welcome US troops with flowers, moreover, played perfectly to the gullibility of the neo-conservatives in and around the Pentagon who had long been determined to invade Iraq and use it as a lever to reshape the Middle East. But if they were taken in by these stirring tales, it was and is their fault; the record of Mr Chalabi is no mystery.
The INC leader is a brilliant man who lobbied Washington with charm and conviction. A western-educated, secular member of Iraq's Shia majority, he must have seemed an ideal projection of Iraq's future after regime change, a seductive image confused as reality. It seems to have given no one pause that he had no standing in Iraq, which he left as a boy. Or, indeed, that he was best known in the region for the Petra bank fraud in Jordan, for which he was sentenced to 22 years in jail in 1990 (he fled the country to avoid imprisonment). He says he was set up by Saddam; that is not what knowledgeable bankers in Amman and Beirut say.
In 2001 the INC - which has received nearly $40m (£22.5m) from Washington - fell foul of a US audit reported to have uncovered expenditure on paintings for its offices and gym subscriptions for its staff. Now, it appears, the INC seems to have profited from last year's currency changeover in Iraq. Mr Chalabi, a gifted mathematician whose doctoral thesis was on Knot Theory, has left a lot of loose ends dangling in his controversial career.
Unsurprisingly, when the US flew him and his self-styled "Free Iraqi" militia into Iraq last year, those Iraqis who knew him were unimpressed. His part in persuading the occupation authority to dissolve the regular army, as well as a blanket purge instead of the selective rooting out of Saddam's henchmen, top the lengthy list of misjudgments of the past year. So bad has Mr Chalabi's relationship with his former patrons become that officials in Washington are accusing him of passing US intelligence to Iran.
Yet it would be quite wrong to make Mr Chalabi a scapegoat. Ultimately, he was the construct of geo-political fantasists in Washington, which is surely where the responsibility lies for his and their shortcomings.
I believe he first mentioned the Palis in his second Al Jazeera tape.
This is another one of those "Jews control the world" kook theories..like the Bilderburgers etc.
Mark Levin pointed out on his radio show today that the railing against the so-called neo-cons (Kristol, Podhoretz,Perle,Wolfowitz etc)who supposedly control the President is just a code phrase for blaming the Jews .
Well you implied that the communists maintained control of Afghanistan for 10 years after the Soviets were driven out. The fact remains that the Mujideen controlled Afghanistan from 1991 until 1996 and the Taliban controlled the country until we drove them out in 2002. But to the point of your assertion that Reagan's backing of the Mujideen was a "neo-con failure." That is specious. The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan was the final straw and arguably the most import reason for the final collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the death knell for their military viability.
That's what I was thinking. He is an opportunist when it comes to claiming causes.
That knife cuts both ways.
The term Paleo has been used around here to infer anti-semitism or worse on culture righties unjustifiably.
A once famous FReeper named after a Star Wars character did this almost daily and he had a following....
Anyone exhibited cultural conservatism or God forbid something arcane like Southern chauvanism and the Paleo label was unfurled along with the smears like anti-semite, talibanista, bigot etc.
That is no more accurate or fair than labeling all Neos as Jewish "Sons of Trotsky"
This is why my antennae go up when I hear these terms....they are rarely used in a benign way.
I long for the old FR days when I was a Newbie and the only war was between Conservatives and Libertarians.
LOL
Neleoconservatives. Hmmm. That has a nice ring to it . . .
Great stuff, wardaddy. Almost as good as "Husband-in-Law". ;0)
When I first showed up here during the agonizing RECOUNT to post, I was stunned at the acrimony between Libertarians and Conservatives....now it seems quaint.
There are not many high-volume-posting Libertarians left.
Folks like OWK....I guess tpaine still carries the torch.
I like a couple of things about them but I'm just your garden variety Molon Labe, anti-infanticide, crush Moon Rock Nazis conservative with one foot in the culture war and another in US power projection.
Where'd the Libertarians go?
Just pick any drug thread. They tend to cluster there. Most of those threads end up in the backroom.
Thanks.
My husband in law is now my ally. He is so much easier to deal with than the ex-wife. (also known as the Queen Shrew of the Known Universe For Now and All Time Henceforth)
Actually, the "tumlers" (sp?) of the Castskill Mountains resorts,were the training grounds of many old,famous standup comics and one movie comic...Danny Kay.
BTW...many of the MOST famous plays of the Yiddish theatre,were inspired by/outright stolen from such Jewish giants as William Shakespeare. :-)
hey sink.
I am not a complete daft pr*ck...
but when I read the article I saw the term thrown around "trotskyite".
I know of Trotsky.
HOW in the hell are the dreaded neocons, trotskyites?
I just don't get the connection.
clue me in.
Some of the well known "neo-cons" fathers were "trotskyite". at least according to legend. The Neo-Cons have also been called "red-diaper" babies.
and here last week some freeper told me that neocons were all jews.
and we all know jews are bad right?
we are jews, we are trotskyites, we are not men... we are DEVO.
what a zoo!
Now you are getting the message.
You know, I've honestly had several people ask me if my "rdb" meant "red-diaper baby."
No lie.
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