The role of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi has fascinated me for years. The corporate press used him as a key source over Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Oops. Wikileaks delivers a little more: For Iraq-watchers, a tiny but enticing tidbit surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from February 2004, 11 months after the U.S.-led invasion. It involved Ahmad…
The role of Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraq invasion is infamous. Friend of the neo-cons, feeder of false WMD stories, backer of war and close to Iran. Seven years on, nothing has changed.
Senior Bush administration official on Ahmed Chalabi: “Think of him as a former football player – that was all then. That’s what he did in his other life.” “That” includes lying about Iraq’s WMD, spying for Iran, embezzling funds and leading clueless American officials to believe that the Iraqi people would welcome the “liberation” forces…
Handy lessons that should be observed by all before advocating the bombing of Iran/Syria/Libya/anywhere. Foreign Policy’s Steve Walt: #1:… You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don’t speak, and that you never paid…
Riverbend was one of the most prolific and savvy Iraqi bloggers during the 2003 Iraq war. And then, she disappeared, not writing for years. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, she’s back with a short and devastating post about her country: April 9, 2013 marks ten years since the fall of Baghdad. Ten years…
The ever-widening influence of Iraqi Ahmed Chalabi.
My following book review appears in today’s Weekend Australian newspaper: The Man Who Pushed America to War By Aram Roston Nation Books, 400pp, $49.95 Ahmed Chalabi, the chameleon-like Iraqi exile who fed bogus intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to the Bush administration and to willing media, told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph in 2004 that…
My following review is about the book by The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq: Kristofer Shawn Goldsmith was a former army sergeant in the US army. He enlisted in late 2003 at age eighteen and believed then, “under the influence of the media and its terrorism paranoia”, that Saddam Hussein…
Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, February 20: There’s been predictably little interesting discussion in the United States of Fidel Castro’s retirement as Cuba’s commandante en jefe, maximo etc. That’s because in the U.S. political mainstream, Cuba policy has for a generation been grotesquely disfigured by a collective kow-towing — yes, collective, it was that craven Mr.…
Before the Iraq war, the neo-cons put forward Ahmed Chalabi as the epitome of bravery. Sure, he was a charlatan, liar and fraud, but Iraq is now “liberated”, so what does he care? Fast forward to 2007 and the imminent strike against Iran, and who steps up? Amir Abbas Fakhrava. He also talks about George…