"We think in generalities, we live in details"
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« on: 2004-05-28 17:53:47 »
[Blunderov]I know that journalists the world over are wont to append 'gate' to any scandal involving nefarious activities by a government. But this story might actually be as enormous, if not more so, than Watergate.
This Byzantine plot seems to have somehow avoided leaping to the forefront of the collective conscious until now. This may change quite soon - it seems there may be some arrests in the offing. And this time there is no possibility of fobbing it off on the footsoldiers. Best Regards.
"The real target goes beyond Chalabi. The hunt is on, in the Republican Party, in Congress, in the CIA and State Department and in a media which is being deluged with leaks, for Chalabi's friends and sponsors in Washington - the group known as the neo-cons. In particular, the targets seem to be Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the former assistant secretary (in Reagan's day) Richard Perle, Vice President Dick Cheney's national security aide Scooter Libby, and the National Security Council's Middle East aide Elliott Abrams. The leaking against them - from sources who insist on anonymity, but some CIA and FBI veterans - is intense. Some of the sources are now private citizens, making a good living through business connections in the Arab world." </excerpt>
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
RE: virus: Chalabigate
« Reply #1 on: 2004-05-28 18:34:29 »
[Blunderov] Laden with interesting facts and amusingly written. (Did you know that the Chalabi family had a reputation for mathematical genius?) Best Regards
And so, in the midst of a half dozen or so other calamities that made its final whimper almost inaudible, the maniacal neoconservative bid to take over the world crashed into the dust. The event received a moderate amount of play in the nation's print dailies, but it was and still is impossible for our punditocracy to discuss the momentous development in the depth that its importance demands, because the story is simply too complicated for the media, in its modern state of pubescent infatuation with the glib and the obvious, to take on.
This site, thankfully, with its feature-length columns and unusually enlightened readership, resists still the incessant pull towards the Fear Factorization of news and commentary. I shall therefore take up the challenge of explaining the Chalabi situation here. </snip>
<snip> The plan was perfect, except for one minor detail - the CIA could not be brought on board. Besides Tenet's antipathy for Chalabi, a major war between the White House and the CIA had broken out over the Bush Administration's brazen outing, during the run-up to the Iraq war, of a deep-cover agency operative named Valerie Plame. Thus the whole operation would have to be conducted without the CIA's knowledge... Predictably, the CIA eventually got wind of the plan. They waited for just the right moment, and they leaked word to the authorities in Iraq that Chalabi was passing U.S. secrets to the Iranians. Chalabi's offices were raided, and his top aides were forced into hiding. The long, happy life of Ahmed Chalabi, future ruler of the pan-Arab oil empire, was over. </snip>
If it turns out that Chalabi was an Iranian stalking horse mole, enticing the US into Iraq at Iranian behest so we would topple the hated-by-them Saddam for them by supplying us with disinfo. about Iraqi WMD's, they might have outsmarted not only US intelligence, but also themselves, as I perceive the example of a free, democratic and prosperous Iraq on their western border to be a much greater threat to the continuation of the Iranian mullahcracy than Saddam ever was, as the internal opposition inspired by such an example will eventually lead to their demise...if their plan was to use Sadr to engineer a friendly Shi'ite mullahcracy on their western border, it has failed miserably.
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #3 on: 2004-05-29 03:41:41 »
Joe Dees Sent: 29 May 2004 03:18 AM
If it turns out that Chalabi was an Iranian stalking horse mole, enticing the US into Iraq at Iranian behest so we would topple the hated-by-them Saddam for them by supplying us with disinfo. about Iraqi WMD's, they might have outsmarted not only US intelligence, but also themselves, as I perceive the example of a free, democratic and prosperous Iraq on their western border to be a much greater threat to the continuation of the Iranian mullahcracy than Saddam ever was, as the internal opposition inspired by such an example will eventually lead to their demise...if their plan was to use Sadr to engineer a friendly Shi'ite mullahcracy on their western border, it has failed miserably.
---- [Blunderov] If. It seems to me that it will take many years of foreign occupation to realize this outcome. And that doesn't seem to be the plan right now. The history of Iraq suggests to me that the moment foreign troops leave there will be a coup. Maybe several.
Democracy in the Middle East means Islam. And the Shi'ites ARE the majority in the area so it seems that Iran has backed the form horse at least.
(Interestingly, that man Douglas Feith seems once again not to be very far away from the epicenter of disaster. His talent for making serious mistakes is quite breathtaking. I shall watch his further career with interest.)
'If' it turns out that the Likud party has been complicit in aiding and abetting the Iranian deception of the USA, this too may turn out to have interesting ramifications.
Especially in conjuction with the possibility that it may have come to the attention of the house of Saud that it's ally, the USA, does not necessarily consider the relationship to be completely indispensable.
Since Iraq is composed of both Shi'ites and (Kurdish and Arab) Sunnis (not to mention a sizeable population of other faiths, including Christianity), any governmental structure that can succeed in binding them together must be able to transcend this sectarianism. Democracy does not mean that Muslims won't be predominantly elected there (Christians are predominantly elected in America and Europe, after all); it instead means that nobody's version of absolute truth is codified into constitutional law. After the handover of administrative power in Iraq, the US forces will nevertheless stay for some time, in order to protect the fledgling Iraqi constitutional democracy until it grows strong enough to preserve itself and offer security to Iraqi citizens. As the Baathist dead-enders, the iranian-mullahcracy-inspired Shi'ite hotheads and the imported Al Qaedan shaheeds will continue to attack such a government for as long as thet are able to do so, I forsee US troops maintaining a significant and effective presence in Iraq for quite some time after the handover of civil authority. This will be noncontroversial as far as the majority of the Irawis are concerned; the majority of Iraqis, according to the BBC poll, both desire a the adoption of a constitutional democracy to administer their country, and want the US military to stay until it is safe (for both the new Iraqi government and for Iraqi citizens) for it to leave.
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #5 on: 2004-05-29 07:11:08 »
Joe Dees Sent: 29 May 2004 12:22 PM
Since Iraq is composed of both Shi'ites and (Kurdish and Arab) Sunnis (not to mention a sizeable population of other faiths, including Christianity), any governmental structure that can succeed in binding them together must be able to transcend this sectarianism. Democracy does not mean that Muslims won't be predominantly elected there (Christians are predominantly elected in America and Europe, after all); it instead means that nobody's version of absolute truth is codified into constitutional law. After the handover of administrative power in Iraq, the US forces will nevertheless stay for some time, in order to protect the fledgling Iraqi constitutional democracy until it grows strong enough to preserve itself and offer security to Iraqi citizens. As the Baathist dead-enders, the iranian-mullahcracy-inspired Shi'ite hotheads and the imported Al Qaedan shaheeds will continue to attack such a government for as long as thet are able to do so, I forsee US troops maintaining a significant and effective presence in Iraq for quite some time after the handover of civil authority. This will be noncontroversial as far as the majority of the Irawis are concerned; the majority of Iraqis, according to the BBC poll, both desire a the adoption of a constitutional democracy to administer their country, and want the US military to stay until it is safe (for both the new Iraqi government and for Iraqi citizens) for it to leave.
---- [Blunderov] A thorny problem is that of legitimacy. It remains to seen how the transfer of power from what will be seen as an illegitimate government to one that is has legitimacy will unfold.
With regard to the BBC poll, other opinion is that most Iraqis want the US to leave immediately. Who to believe?
Since Iraq is composed of both Shi'ites and (Kurdish and Arab) Sunnis (not to mention a sizeable population of other faiths, including Christianity), any governmental structure that can succeed in binding them together must be able to transcend this sectarianism. Democracy does not mean that Muslims won't be predominantly elected there (Christians are predominantly elected in America and Europe, after all); it instead means that nobody's version of absolute truth is codified into constitutional law. After the handover of administrative power in Iraq, the US forces will nevertheless stay for some time, in order to protect the fledgling Iraqi constitutional democracy until it grows strong enough to preserve itself and offer security to Iraqi citizens. As the Baathist dead-enders, the iranian-mullahcracy-inspired Shi'ite hotheads and the imported Al Qaedan shaheeds will continue to attack such a government for as long as thet are able to do so, I forsee US troops maintaining a significant and effective presence in Iraq for quite some time after the handover of civil authority. This will be noncontroversial as far as the majority of the Irawis are concerned; the majority of Iraqis, according to the BBC poll, both desire a the adoption of a constitutional democracy to administer their country, and want the US military to stay until it is safe (for both the new Iraqi government and for Iraqi citizens) for it to leave.
---- [Blunderov] A thorny problem is that of legitimacy. It remains to seen how the transfer of power from what will be seen as an illegitimate government to one that is has legitimacy will unfold.
With regard to the BBC poll, other opinion is that most Iraqis want the US to leave immediately. Who to believe?
Best Regards
Legitimacy is always a problem with the establishment of a new government, especially one that replaces an authoritarian regime, but neither I nor the majority of Iraqis care if the antidemocratic insurgents view the new Iraqi government to be legitimate or not. They know that it is a transitional government, and that it will only rule until the direct elections are held in 2005. Considering how long they have already waited and suffered, with no hope of relief, under Saddam's mirderous dictatorship, I am reasonably confident that they'll bear with the process until it runs its course.
As to other opinion, I have not seen it supported by polls. I tend to trust the horses' mouths (the Iraqis themselves), and that is who was asked by the BBC (and yes, they were quite surprised, and dare I say it, disappointed, but to their credit, they reported the poll esults anyway).
"We think in generalities, we live in details"
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #7 on: 2004-05-29 08:56:14 »
Joe Dees Sent: 29 May 2004 01:59 PM
As to other opinion, I have not seen it supported by polls. I tend to trust the horses' mouths (the Iraqis themselves), and that is who was asked by the BBC (and yes, they were quite surprised, and dare I say it, disappointed, but to their credit, they reported the poll esults anyway).
WASHINGTON - Despite concerns about their own safety, the majority of Iraqis say they want the U.S. and British troops now in Iraq to leave within the next few months, according to a countrywide poll of people in Iraq.
"There's a sense of disillusionment," Gallup's director of international polling, Richard Burkholder, said today. "They had higher expectations of us. If we can sweep their army aside in a matter of weeks, why can't we stabilize their country? We're a victim of their high expectations."
Seven in 10 said their lives or the lives of their family would be in danger if they were seen to be co-operating with the Coalition Provisional Authority currently governing Iraq. Almost two-thirds, 64 per cent, said actions by the coalition have turned out worse than they expected at the time of the invasion.
The CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll was taken between March 22 and April 9, before the latest rounds of fighting between coalition forces and insurgents. A relatively small number of the 3,444 face-to-face interviews were conducted more recently.
Almost six in 10, 57 per cent, said they would like to see coalition troops leave "immediately, within the next few months," while 36 per cent said they would like to see those troops stay longer.
Despite the reservations, Iraqis have mixed feelings about the effects of the U.S. led invasion.
- Six in 10 say ousting Saddam Hussein was worth the hardships they have faced since then.
- Half said they are better off since Saddam was ousted, while 25 per cent said they are doing about the same.
Burkholder said the trend in Baghdad, where Gallup polled last August and September, reflects a drop in attitudes about U.S. troops.
Last August, almost six in 10 Iraqis said they had a positive view of how U.S. troops are behaving. Now, residents of Baghdad view U.S. soldiers negatively, by almost 8-1.
Only a quarter of Iraqis said attacks on U.S. troops are completely unjustified. Less than a third of Iraqis said the attacks are completely or somewhat justified from a moral standpoint. Another one in five said those attacks are sometimes justified.
Seven in 10 in the poll said they view the U.S. presence as an occupation and not a liberation.
Both Sunnis and Shiites shared the generally negative views of the U.S. mission in Iraq and U.S. troops.
But in the Sunni region in central Iraq, where troops have faced some of the strongest resistance, six in 10 said the attacks on U.S. troops can be justified morally.
The poll conducted by the Pan Arab Research Center of Dubai had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points. </q>
As to other opinion, I have not seen it supported by polls. I tend to trust the horses' mouths (the Iraqis themselves), and that is who was asked by the BBC (and yes, they were quite surprised, and dare I say it, disappointed, but to their credit, they reported the poll esults anyway).
Could an outside Muslim poll perhaps be even more self-servingly skewed than one would expect of the BBC? Or do you think it has to more do with Berg, Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghraib (it WAS taken a couple of weeks later than the BBC poll), or perhaps where and who the people were who were asked?
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #9 on: 2004-05-29 10:29:17 »
One thing on which I happen to agree with Joe Dees is that I don't think much of BBC's political coverage either lately. They tend to do "lazy journalism", just adding something like "maybe it is so, maybe not" after most stories they report. They have seen better days.
Now, about that Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll in Iraq (April 2004)
Should US/British forces leave immediately (next few months)? Baghdad: 75% yes Shi’ite areas: 61% yes Sunni areas: 65% yes Kurdish areas: 3% yes Total (average): 57% yes
We notice a similar pattern with questions more "delicate" to the people asked, such as whether the attacks on coalition troops are justified.
As an Iraqi put it: <quote> "I'm not ungrateful that they took away Saddam Hussein," says Salam Ahmed, 30, a Shiite businessman. "But the job is done. Thank you very much. See you later. Bye-bye." <end quote>
At the same time, the poll suggests that many Iraqis (44-50% in Iraq proper) would feel less safe with what would be left behind if the occupation troops left today. I doubt this can be attributed to loyal Saddamists. A society with demolished state structures is a more likely reason.
Generally, the polls have this problem: They factor-in the Kurdish, whose main concern is to stay free from Iraqi authority. Dubya seems to get 95% approval in Kurdistan (hmm... does anyone think what I think...?) The reasonable thing to do would be an independent Kurdistan, but some precious US allies such as Turkey wouldn't be amused at all by this....
Re: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #10 on: 2004-05-29 10:50:08 »
: and prosperous Iraq on their : western border to be a much : greater threat to the : continuation of the Iranian : mullahcracy than Saddam ever : was, as the internal opposition
Iraq is southeast of Iran... However,
I agree, a U.S. controlled/secularized Iraq will be a greater threat to Iran than Saddam was, and yes, I think Chalabi was a plant... However I think the CIA knew he was a plant and quietly facilitated his deceit. --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
To be fair, Rhino, traditional Kurdistan circumscribes chunks of not only Iraq and Turkey, but Iran and Syria as well. None of them wanna give their chunks back to the Kurds. It has never ceased to amaze me that the largest group of stateless people in the world, the thirty million Kurds, don't get more attention. I guess this is because they're busy setting up proto-democracies rather than teaching their children to be human bombs. Guess which one makes the news?
My childish view of a nasty America is still popular By Charles Moore http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;sessionid=BJ1OYO52BJBNPQFIQMGCM5OAVCBQUJVC?xml=/opinion/2004/05/29/do2901.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/05/29/ixopinion.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=52030
As with most British people, my first impressions of America were formed by television. For my family in the 1960s, this meant the BBC alone. We had one of those "snobbish" televisions, not unusual at that time, that could not get the only other channel, ITV. And the BBC in America at that time meant Charles Wheeler. With his highly educated voice, shock of white hair (I think it was white even then), serious spectacles and face of lean intelligence, he was the perfect posh broadcaster. I believed every word he said.
I still think Wheeler is an excellent journalist and a clever man. But what I - and presumably millions of others - were hearing from him and the BBC was a particular narrative about America. This was that there were good, liberal people who believed in civil rights. If they were white, the good ones came from the northern states and never spoke about religion.
If they were black, the good ones came from the southern states and spoke about religion a lot. These good people were fighting oppression, whether of black people or of the people of Vietnam. The hero was Senator Eugene McCarthy, who failed to get the Democratic nomination in 1968.
The oppressors, the bad people, wanted war and racial segregation. They were fat and ugly and always white and liked having guns. The villain was Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who stood as an independent in the same election, and believed in segregation. The pictures of him that appeared always showed his face darkened with what we were supposed to think of as racial hatred.
This picture of the United States was not all wrong, but it was notable for what it missed out. I learnt very little about the vigour of the freedom provided for under the American Constitution, the country's encouragement of large-scale immigration, its rising living standards. I did not know how well America had reconstructed Germany, Japan and the economies of western Europe after the war.
The BBC did not preach to me about the Soviet threat with the same ardour that it preached about racial prejudice. I therefore thought that America was very violent and very backward, and I could never quite understand why such a country was by far the most powerful in the world. If I asked people why, they would say, "Oh well, it's because it's so rich," as if wealth were something that simply descended upon you without the contribution of human effort. As a result, I understood very little about America.
Today, we are presented with a similar narrative - so powerful that I find that 90 per cent of people here believe it, even those who think of themselves as conservative. The narrative is that America is bullying and naive about the outside world. It is very keen on killing people. George W Bush is taken to embody these characteristics, since he wears cowboy boots and is inarticulate and prays a lot. (Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians.)
There are good Americans who, again, come from the north-east and never talk about religion. You can tell they are good because they are not "unilateralist". Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, is, ex officio, a good American. But the bad Americans, with guns and money and a white God, are in charge. To show the strength of the narrative, take two stories out of Iraq.
Suppose that the reports accusing UN officials of corruption in the oil-for-food programme had been made against America. Suppose that it was Halliburton, the company for whom Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, which had taken 10 per cent off the oil-for-food contracts. Suppose that America were accused of the sort of behaviour that has been alleged, on the basis of Iraqi official documents, against France and Russia. I think we would have heard of little else. As it is, though, the oil-for-food story has somehow drifted away in a muddle about who's going to run the next bit of the investigation.
And take the story of the police raid on Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress. It has been reported, correctly, that Chalabi is hated by the CIA. That would normally mean, in the latterday Charles Wheeler/BBC narrative, that he was a good person. The smashed photograph of him with a bullet through the image of his head would have been presented as a horrifying example of Bush's meddling and threatening.
But because Chalabi was supported by "neo-conservatives" (nobody knows what a neo-conservative is, but he's self-evidently bad, because "conservative" is quite bad and making it "neo-" is terrible), he must be wicked; and because he is the most prominent Iraqi politician to argue for a plural democratic form of government in Iraq, he is condemned by the policy establishments as "irrelevant". He is even blamed for persuading the Administration, through bogus intelligence, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, as if this was not common ground before the war, even with bodies such as Unscom, which was lukewarm about the invasion.
The narrative, you see, is so powerful. If the narrators had wanted, they could have presented Chalabi as Nelson Mandela. Instead, they have decided that he is Al Capone.
I don't trust the narrative, but, like almost everyone else in Britain in relation to the Muslim world, I don't have the material to furnish an alternative one.
Thus I cannot believe that Lakhdar Brahimi of the UN is the right man to oversee the setting up of the provisional government of Iraq after June 30.
As a Sunni pan-Arabist socialist from Algeria, he must be automatically distrusted by the Shia majority in Iraq and by the Kurds. Putting him in charge is like asking Senator Edward Kennedy to take control of the affairs of Northern Ireland. But because he is "UN", the narrative says he is good, and of course few of us know enough about the alternative possibilities in Iraq to put a strong counter-argument.
So what is actually happening while we, the British public, follow the narrative, half-bored, half-horrified, desperately wanting to be told that something good will turn up? I think the answer is that the people who have long made it their business to run these things, reassert control. Their universal doctrine is that the nasty people - Mugabe, Brezhnev, Milosevic, Arafat, once upon a time, Saddam himself - are the ones to prop up in the interests of "stability".
The "camel corps" of Foreign Office Arabists, many of whom work for Arab interests when they retire, will return to the policies that they have pursued towards the Arab world for generations. So will the State Department. These policies are based on the assumption that you Arabs cannot have anything resembling the sort of society we in the West take for granted.
As King Abdullah of Jordan - a "moderate", but also someone whose country was economically dependent on Saddam - recently put it, Iraq should be ruled by "somebody with a military background who has experience of being a tough guy". Remind you of anyone?
RE: virus: Chalabigate.
« Reply #13 on: 2004-05-29 18:33:23 »
[Joe Dees] To be fair, Rhino, traditional Kurdistan circumscribes chunks of not only Iraq and Turkey, but Iran and Syria as well. None of them wanna give their chunks back to the Kurds. It has never ceased to amaze me that the largest group of stateless people in the world, the thirty million Kurds, don't get more attention. I guess this is because they're busy setting up proto-democracies rather than teaching their children to be human bombs. Guess which one makes the news?
[rhinoceros] It wouldn't have to include all those chunks. The curent issue is any Kurdish state at all. USA refuses to grant it. Why? There is a Turkish veto because of possible future instability in their own Kurdish territories (they have handled that in a very ruthless manner so far). Iran and Syria are in no position to veto anything.
The Kurdish get a lot of press here, OK. I suspect the main reason the Kurdish issue is largely ignored in the international scene is that nobody big and important has any stake, so the US policy regarding Kurdistan is up for sale.
They pay a fair amount of money to Barzani and Talabani, the two warlords who ar in control of the Iraqi Kurdistan, to keep the oil tubes safe, and that's all there is to it.
The US might be more amenable to a Kurdish state now than they were before, considering the cold shoulder the US received from the Turks in the run-up to the Iraqi incursion. OTOH, the Kurds in northern Iraq seem quite accepting of remaining within a unified Iraq, as long as they are granted some degree of regional autonomy within such a federal system.