That "good old fashioned paleo-con" can go straight to hell as far as I'm concerned.
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.
Nah. Nobody will tolerate you anarchists in positions of power.
Indeed. No lefty ever has. And you are no exception.
Is it the conservative part you hate? Or the neo?
Is it that you think they are all evil jews?
how about a good old fashioned paleo-con?
Please give us all the definition of a neo-con.
Like Lew Rockwell? Or Justine Raimondo?
I'd rather drink Drano.
I don't like the neocons because their agenda is dangerous leftist inspired drivel presented in a new manner.
Those men are Libertarians as far as I can tell. I am neither a paleo or a Libertarian - just a classic orthodox conservative. But I would trust a libertarian and a paleo over a neocon ANY DAY.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...you just wrote obscenities.
All this "neo-con," "paleo-con" stuff is inside baseball, and nobody, other than the paleo-cons, gives a rat's ass about any of it.
Simple question, really.
Did YOU vote for Reagan? Then YOU voted for a neo-con.
More like pocket pool! LOL
The only people that truly use the term "neo-con" really mean JEW and are usually anti-semites.
That "good old fashioned paleo-con" can go straight to hell as far as I'm concerned.
Hell look at his profile he probably isn't old enough to vote today.
I take it you're lining up on the latter.
big govt-Welfare state-internationalists
He plays with dolls!:-)
Neocon, Paleocon... isn't it just *so* cute when they learn new words?
Ronald Reagan was no neocon - his policy 'The Reagan Doctrine' was to allow people to free themselves rather then free them by force. Where Reagan followed necon policy in Afghanistan and Lebanon it was a failure -yes arming the Muslims and building a network of jihad was a Jimmy Carter neocon (most original neocons are Democrats like Richard Perle) policy that had a terrible blowback.
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