Chalabi

So I come back from vacation to news reports that Chalabi may have been spying for Iran all along.

Initial reaction: can this possibly be true?

Responsible reaction: I should probably wait for a better sourced story or independent corroboration before I decide that it is. I'm not buying the angle that Iran wanted to trick us into deposing Saddam, for example--"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is"; very few countries want a hostile occupier on their borders; and journalists don't understand intelligence very well and can be led to report speculation as facts and tell a small part of the story that looks like a whole. (This worked very much to the administration's advantage in the buildup to the war.)

Snarky reaction: now we know what you have to do to fall out of favor with/get fired from the Bush administration. You have to be too nice to the Democrats, or spy for the Iranians. If you can safely steer between that Scylla and that teeny tiny Charybdis, though, you can be as incompetent as you like.
Now that that's settled, I ask: just how incompetent does this administration have to be before it gets fired?

Comments

[Edward]

Chalabi was on MTP this morning saying this is all simply George Tenet trying to get him (ignoring Russert's pointing out that it's the DoD, not the CIA, moving against him) and ranting again and again that he'll testify under oath before Congress...why, you'd think he was an American politician, the way he seemed entitled to this platform....

Funny you should ask this Katherine: just how incompetent does this administration have to be before it gets fired?

It seems that's the exact meme the DNC has settled on in it's quest to label W. There was some blogchatter a while back (can't find the post) about what's an effective soundbite to paint W, and "He's incompetent" seemed to be the winner. I still prefer "He's a fraud" but that got passed over obviously (too complicated I guess).

Both have the advantage of being pithy and true, so it doesn't realy matter I guess. But watch for that to become the mantra.

[asdf]

He's incompetent!

Also noteworthy - Chalabi said that Bush was the most popular politician in Iraq, and that any future Iraqi government would definitely align itself with US interests.

[Hal]

"I'm not buying the angle that Iran wanted to trick us into deposing Saddam"

Hey, the Iranian despots probably aren't any more competent than our administration. Perhaps they also believed that Chalabi would have been quickly appointed sock puppet in chief and our troops would move out, leaving behind some bases to harrass.

Or, as we're now experiencing, they figured we'd blow the occupation and end up with a boat anchor around our millitary. We can't even keep a lid on Iraq with 135K troops. I don't think we're going to add Iran to the whole mix. They may have figured, Chalabi or not, the US was going to have a hell of a time, understaffed and outplayed.

Just saying...

There's plenty of ways of looking at this in which it does make sense from Iraq's perspective. Some of them involve incompetence in a dictitorial regime and others require... well... incompetence in a dictitorial regime.

[SDAI-Tech1]

You guys and gals just don't get it do you?

We have Iraq! We have the most central nation in the Arab world with access to the Saudi, Syrian, Kuwaiti, Iranian, Turkish and Jordanian borders!

I remember quite plainly when our greatest tactical asset in the region was the tiny island of Diego Garcia roughly 8/74 degrees lat/long, in the center of the Indian Ocean and we had to spy over Iraq, Iran and these regions from this island some 2500 miles distant! Look at a map sometime and you'll see how futile this situation was.

The region will never be the same. US influence is contagious. It's simply impossible for a nation that has been Americanized to go back to barbarism. (insert Abu Ghraib snarky retort here)

Yes, the big picture - the ones the media don't want you to see - is completely changed. The US will always have a greater influence into these regions. We will have a whole network of intelligence agents that are undercover and are as I write this post assimilating into the Arab world. Even were we to somehow hightail it out of Iraq tomorrow, the US would still have huge influence and access that it never had to this key part of the world.

From a tactical POV the Iraq conflict and occupation is a complete success. It has inserted the USA into a region where previously only the Europeans held great influence - at our expense.

Saddam is gone. His example will ALWAYS serve as a fear for leaders in the region who get too big for their britches and defy the US. These nations do not believe (rightly so) that the US left will somehow be able to curtail future military action and so they behave better. Look at Libya! Here we see a nation voluntarily reveal its WMD program and begin to dismantle it. That accomplishment alone may have saved millions of future lives.

Bush incompetent? That's a laugh. He's bolder than Nixon, Reagan and his father combined. Having Bush in office is sort of a look at what a MacArthur administration might've look like in the 21st century. Totally proactive. Totally confident in American superiority of purpose and completely unafraid to use military might to achieve US foreign policy goals.

What you decry as incompetent is merely the natural side effects of decisiveness. Decisive action is messy. Bold actions do not occur without feedback and reverberations. CNN and others may focus on whether the US is more liked - but they ignore entirely that the US has become more powerful than it has been in over thirty years.

I know, militaristic and tactical gains are the least important to a warm hearted person. An intelligent, warm hearted person, however, who has the best interests of the world at heart can't help but eventually realize the more powerful the US is, the safer, more peaceful and freer the world becomes in the long haul. (And believe me I don't want to see us sell our soul or our freedoms to achive this goal)

Now if you really believe the world would be freest under a socialist system like the EU then my efforts here to point out the big picture will be pretty futile.

To someone who views history not in bite-sized decades but rather in centuries - the rise of US power is mandatory to the best destiny of mankind. Deep in your heart you know it is true, even though you may still cling to childlike globalist, socialistic visions.

SDAI-Tech1

[Anarch]

The best posts are the ones where you can honestly can't tell if the person is joking. Well done! :)

[asdf]

um, we have bases or access to bases in bahrain, qatar, saudi arabia, turkey, afghanistan, uzbekistan, jordan, israel in a pinch, UAE, port at Yemen (tho risky).

Just sayin'.

[Karlo]

Why does everyone keep repeating this nonsense about Chalabi having provided crucial intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq? The powers that be had decided on the Iraq invasion early on and were happy to use any source (no matter how unreliable or patently false) to justify their war.

[Slartibartfast]

I agree that it's hard to get fired. I've been politely requesting the head of George Tenet since...well, for a couple of years, now. No dice there.

I honestly don't know if he's a competent civil servant, but his failure to dismiss Deutch (added to his willingness to keep him on, with clearance) needed to be addressed in some way or other. At the very least, he ought to have been demoted.

[penelope]

"We will have a whole network of intelligence agents that are undercover and are as I write this post assimilating into the Arab world."

Ah yes, hordes of undercover agents sipping tea in the cafés, shopping for carpets and bracelets at the souk, dining at the most expensive restaurants, staying at the best hotels, infiltrating spas, pretending to be high-class tourists and businessmen.

It costs each taxpayer about $20 an hour, but you have to admit, it's very clever.

They gather all sorts of extremely useful intelligence, such as the kind that prevented 9/11 from happening.

[Doctor Memory]

My completely uninformed speculation: if Chalabi was an Iranian intelligence asset, his value to them was in preventing any sort of rapprochement between the Americans and Saddam, which we can safely assume was Iran's nightmare scenario circa 1998 or so. Probably not in their wildest dreams did they expect that anyone would actually be stupid enough to order a full-scale invasion based on the INC's "evidence."

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[Jesurgislac]

Chalabi's sock puppet is reminding us about some more of Bush's lies on a thread from 2004...

(Well, either that, or a fairly stoopid spammer.)