The Spy Who Loved Us


Thirty-three million dollars later, America's best Iraqi friend and Our erstwhile Chosen Iraqi Leader is being accused of spying for Iran. In a remarkable chorus of newspaper and magazine reports cited by Tim Russert in his Meet the Press interview of Ahmad Chalabi, the guy who reputedly convinced the Bushies to sound the alarm that Saddam was ready to launch nuclear missiles filled with anthrax into every sandbox and corporate headquarters in America, was a conduit for disinformation promulgated by Iran. Its aim was to goad America into attacking Iraq and toppling Saddam. Good thing cooler heads prevailed. Didn't they?

With narrowed eyes and furtive brow, Russert played the indignant American to Chalabi's cool denials. You lied and innocent Americans bought it. It's all your fault! What a show!

If indeed these charges are correct, what sweet revenge for both Iran and Iraq. For it was the U.S. government, reputedly in tandem with Israel, that tried its best to make the Iraq-Iran war last longer, with more destruction. The idea was to ruin both countries, much as the war in Afghanistan had destroyed that country and depleted the Soviet Union, leading to its self-destruction---all helped mightily by U.S. covert aid, arms and other meddling.

It was in order to help Afghanistan fight the Soviets that the U.S. trained and armed an obscure Saudi rich boy named Osama bin Laden, and supported him in using Islam as a rallying rationale for organized armed violence. His first foray into his new business was financed by the CIA.

When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, Israel converted supported Iran while the U.S. pretty openly support Iraq (while selling, or at least trying to sell arms to Iran secretly. Remember Iran-Contra?) It was the U.S. that provided Saddam with WMDs, including chemical weapons and anthrax. The U.S. trained Iraqis to use these weapons, and helped target attacks on Iran and the Kurds. This was the Reagan administration, with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, who is described by Mahmood Mamdani in his new book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, as "a central figure in Reagan's effort to court Saddam."

Then came former CIA director George Bush I, who as President invaded and defeated Iraq, but did not attempt to overthrow Saddam or occupy the country. Occupation, he thought, was a quagmire that couldn't succeed. His son George II apparently believed with some passion that this was a major failure of the old man, maybe even a cowardly one. He was going to set things right, and as Carl Bernstein discovered in interviews for his book, Little George didn't so much as ask the kind of advice of Big George that former presidents would ask of predecessors of the opposite party. This likely was also the view of Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, making them easy marks for any guy with the right foreign accent who would tell them what they wanted to hear. And they didn't even have to stick his face in the toilet or set the dogs on him.

Chalabi denied the stories and made some sense in his interview. Such is the fraught atmosphere in Washington, and this administration and its supporters' proven willingness to say or do anything to grab or maintain power, plus the proven ability of the establishment press to be gulled and stampeded into huge choruses of panicked bullshit, and/or to see and pitch things according to their own interests, that it's impossible to know at this moment whether or not Chalabi is being set up.

Of course Chalabi and whether he ever really loved us like he said he did, is entirely irrelevant. The incompetent and immoral fanatics running the U.S. government are responsible for these actions. It may take awhile for the media and much of the public to forget their own complicity long enough to hold them responsible.