The
Daily Camera April 9, 2003 Bush
offers crooks and warmongers to lead
Iraq AUSTIN, Texas - Oh
good. It looks as though we're going to
have as big a fight over postwar plans for
Iraq as we did over the war itself. Just
what we need, more of everybody being at
everybody else's throat. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who seems prepared to run
the world, favors one Ahmed Chalabi
of the Iraqi National Congress, an
exile-emigre group, as postwar leader
(read figurehead-puppet). Chalabi is
bitterly opposed by both the State
Department and the CIA. According to Knight-Ridder's
Jonathan Landay, American military
planes flew Chalabi and 700 troops, the
newly named "First Battalion of Free Iraqi
Forces," into Nasiriyah Sunday to be
integrated into Gen. Tommy Franks'
command. Landay reports, "Senior
administration officials said that Chalabi
had had difficulty recruiting enough
forces to go into southern Iraq and may
have tapped the discredited Badr Brigade,
an Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group, to
get his 700 soldiers." Think how happy the
Iraqis will be to see some detachment from
their old enemy Iran. Landay also reports, "It was
information provided by Chalabi that led
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to a prewar belief
that Iraqis would rise up and welcome the
invading coalition with open arms, that
the Republican Guard would surrender in
droves and the government of Saddam
Hussein would crumble in a matter of
days." One hesitates to make sweeping
generalizations, but anyone who has
studied the history of emigre groups knows
the endless infighting and delusional
quality of the emigre culture. (See if you
can think of an example.) This gets
better. Chalabi has been in exile for
four decades and, in 1992, he was
convicted
on multiple counts of embezzlement of
hundreds of millions of
dollars in
Jordan after the failure of his bank
there. He was sentenced to 22 years in
prison. He escaped from Jordan,
reportedly in the trunk of a car, and
wound up in London. Dick Cheney
is also a Chalabi fan. The Iraqi National Congress has
received millions in American aid money,
but the accounting has been very poor (a
familiar story) and quite a bit of the
money is unaccounted for. Chalabi favors
Savile Row suits. The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz choice for
"viceroy designate" of Iraq is Gen. Jay
Garner, head of the Pentagon's Office
for Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance. Garner is a retired military
man with links to both the international
arms industry and a Jewish lobby group.
After retiring from the Army, Garner
became president of SY Coleman, a defense
contractor specializing in military
defense technology. He is currently on
leave of absence from the company. The problem of Garner's alleged Zionist
sympathies is also causing talk: He
visited Israel as the guest of the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs
and signed a statement in October 2000
blaming the Palestinian Authority for the
violence after the collapse of peace talks
and praising the "remarkable restraint" of
the Israeli army. The third member of the triumvirate
that Rumsfeld & Co. want to run Iraq
is former CIA chief James Woolsey,
who said last week that Iraq is the
opening of the "Fourth World War"
(counting the Cold War as III) and that
America's enemies include the religious
rulers in Iran, states like Syria and
Islamic terrorist groups. So, we've got a crook, a Zionist and an
old spy who thinks this is the beginning
of WWIV set to run Iraq. How lucky can the
Iraqis get? Is this what we thought we
were fighting for? According to David Sanger's
analysis in The New York Times,
"Some hawks in the administration are
convinced that Iraq will serve as a
cautionary example of what can happen to
other sates that refuse to abandon their
programs to build weapons of mass
destruction, an argument that John
Bolton, the undersecretary of state
for arms control, has made several times
in recent speeches." The administration's more pragmatic
wing fears that the war's lesson will be
just the opposite: that the best way to
avoid American military action is to build
a fearsome arsenal quickly and make the
cost of conflict too high for
Washington. Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...
Sen. Ted Stevens suggested last
week that New York City's cops and
firefighters should work overtime without
pay as a wartime sacrifice. "I really feel
strongly that we ought to find some way to
convince the people that there ought to be
some volunteerism at home. Those people
overseas in the desert - they're not
getting overtime. ... I don't know why the
people working for the cities and counties
ought to be paid overtime when they're
responding to matters of national
security." Stevens, R-Alaska, had just voted for
tax cuts that will give those who make a
million dollars a year $92,000 more to
spend on polo ponies. Some must sacrifice
more than others. Copyright
2003, The Daily Camera.
|