How can we miss Chalabi if he won’t go away?
by digby
My piece in Salon this morning is about good old Ahmad Chalabi and his return to the spotlight. (He never seems to go away ….)An excerpt:
The night Chalabi arrived in Iraq having enabled an invasion of his own country was a triumph surely very few have experienced. It reached a high point when he sat next to Laura Bush at the 2004 State of the Union but unfortunately, he had betrayed his patrons by doing a little double dealing with their true mortal enemy: Iran. (You know the old Neocon saying: wimps go to Bagdad, Real Men go to Tehran.) He was accused of forging Iraqi currency with stolen plates from the Iraq mint. And they believed him to have sent his Iranian friends some very sensitive information. These charges were never proven but after a brief stint in the Iraq government in 2005, in which he was held (rightly) responsible for his influence on the U.S. government to institute “de-Bathification” and even more charges of corruption, Chalabi withdrew from the scene. The last we had heard he was holding salons in his basement with various Iraqi experts on finance and government.
So why bring all this up now? Well, heeee’s baaaack. Since the eruption of violence and the emergence of the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq last month, the beltway and the press have made the belated observation that Prime Minister Maliki
Read on. His story still fascinates me, particularly the fact that he has continued to snow American hawks for decades now. They want so much to believe his con job that he can sell it over and over again …
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