The Wonderful Horrible Life of Ahmed Chalabi

Time was, Ahmed Chalabi was Donald Rumsfeld’s main man. Sure, the Iraqi National Congress leader claimed the right to rule Iraq after Saddam even though he hadn’t lived in the country since he was 9 years old. Sure, he was a convicted bank embezzler and con man. (Chalabi claimed the Jordanian government framed him.) But he was a smooth talker, and the neocons—themselves so used to conning others that they were all the more easily taken themselves–in the nascent Bush Administration literally bought–at a cost of millions of dollars–his fictional intelligence.

Invading Iraq, Chalabi told Cheney and Condi, would be a cakewalk. Flowers on the streets.

So the Department of Defense flew Chalabi in with the invading forces, against longstanding US policy, to take over the Iraqi government. The 50 guys you saw celebrating the Marines’ pulling down of the Saddam statue at Farbus Square in Baghdad were all Chalabi’s INC goons. Really. You can look it up.

Of course, naysayers on what the rightist maniacs call “the far left”–in truth, no one from the far left has gotten a word into print in the United States in decades–pointed out that Chalabi was full of shit. Now the rightist maniacs are coming to the same conclusion. In today’s news, it seems that Chalabi may have betrayed the fact that the CIA had broken Iranian code to the Iranians, who are fellow Shias. And the Bush Administration, which went so far as to seat Chalabi next to Laura Bush at the State of the Union address earlier this year, has decided that Chalabi (gasp!) falsified intelligence.

Like the war itself, anyone with half a brain could see that no good could come out of this. And lots of people with that perceptiveness said so, loud and clear. Now would be a good time for the rightist maniacs and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media to admit that, as usual, they were wrong and we were right. Better yet, now would be a good time for them to promise to stay out of politics once and for all. America just can’t afford the rightist maniacs and their incessant fuckups anymore.