“Long slide into the abyss”: Cheney’s old pal Ahmad Chalabi is back

[DonViejo]

A poster child for the farcical Iraq invasion is back -- and he wants to take over the world

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

One of the iconic images of the early days of the Iraq invasion was the picture of the neocon George Washington, former banker and conman Ahmad Chalabi going back to homeland as part of a brilliant plan to airlift exiles into the country to create the “new Iraqi army” under the auspices of his front group the Iraqi National Congress.

U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace explained that “these are Iraqi citizens who want to fight for a free Iraq, who will become basically the core of the new Iraqi army once Iraq is free.” It was just one of many farcical elements of the Iraq invasion. (Recall the Jessica Lynch debacle as well as virtually everything that happened under Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.) But then the group that planned and executed that war were very silly people, and Chalabi had their number from the beginning. Jane Mayer in the New Yorker had his number. In her seminal piece from July 2004, she traced back his involvement to the 1990s when Chalabi was cut loose from his long association with the CIA and then went hunting for new patrons. He’s a clever fellow:

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.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/21/long_slide_into_the_abyss_cheneys_old_pal_ahmad_chalabi_is_back/