Here, on a South African site, is a quote I hadn't seen before concerning the Chalabi fallout:
'"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," it quoted an intelligence source in Washington as saying. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."'
---
Of course there's much still to learn regarding the Chalabi "betrayal", but I'm instantly suspicious that the neocon crowd, his sponsors, didnt know he was the Iranian spy the CIA now claims. They have a tough choice, prefering the ignorance/incompetence route of explaining the egg on their face rather than the alternative, which is admitting, well..
Despite Frumbag's inclusion of Iran in the "Axis Of Evil", one must remember that, also in spite of their largely sectarian hatred of the fundie shi'ia mullahs in Iran, the Kristolmethodist/neocon crowd has been extremely willing to do business with "Ayatollah Assahollahs" before. Michael Ledeen, Elliot Abrams, Doug Feith and Richard Perle were all figures in the facilitation of arms shipments to the Iranians. Remember 1987?
Update: cf this article vis-a-vis the Iranian connection to Chalabi and the question of neoconservative knowledge of it.
'As Chalabi’s operation fed anti-Saddam propaganda into the U.S. decision-making machinery, Bush also should have been alert to the Israeli role in opening doors for Chalabi in Washington. One intelligence source told me that Israel’s Likud government had quietly promoted Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress with Washington’s influential neoconservatives. That would help explain why the neoconservatives, who share an ideological alliance with the conservative Likud, would embrace and defend Chalabi even as the CIA and the State Department denounced him as a con man.
[...]
The idea of Israel promoting an Iranian agent also is not far-fetched if one understands the history. The elder Bush could tell his son about the long-standing strategic ties that have existed between Israel and Iran, both before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979. It was Menachem Begin’s Likud Party that rebuilt the covert intelligence relationship in 1980. Since then, it has been maintained through thick and thin, despite Iran’s public anti-Israeli rhetoric.'
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 9:22 PM
<< Home