Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

You don't have to go far with the mainstream media to see the stories: Bush admits he went to war on faulty intelligence, Bush acknowledges faulty Iraq intelligence, Bush admits he was wrong.  All of these stories carry the same message, "we were wrong, darn it, but we should get credit for standing up and taking responsibility for our mistake."  Besides, according to Bush, the removal of Saddam is more than enough to justify going to war, even if every reason he gave the America public was a mistake.

This piece might look like it fits with what you know.  Clearly, everything we were told about Iraq's WMD and terrorist ties was wrong.  Now Bush admits he was wrong.  Click.  Those two pieces go together.

Only they don't.  The admission is itself just another piece -- another misleading piece.  Because no one made a mistake.  The whole image of what happened to take us to Iraq is still missing a few pieces, but here's ten easy pieces that fill in one corner of the whole story.

1) Ahmed Chalabi.  
See him over there?  He's been called the George Washington of Iraq.  Most often, the media refers to him as the "exiled leader" of "the Iraqi resistance to Saddam."  Who exiled Chalabi?  No one.  He left Iraq when he was only six years old, decades before Saddam came to power.  Chalabi's wealthy family had homes in both the UK and United States, and sent young Ahmed to school at MIT and on for mathematics PhD at the University of Chicago.  After finishing school, Chalabi didn't turn his attention to battling the forces of evil.  Instead, he went to Jordan where he formed the Petra Bank.  The bank proceeded to "misplace" $200 million, Chalabi was convicted of bank fraud (on 106 charges) and sentenced to 17 years in prison.  He fled Jordan one step ahead of the police and retreated to the family's posh digs in London.  There, along with family friends like London publisher Conrad Black and future Bush administration stalwart Richard Perle, Chalabi was recast.  He began to express the idea that his bank failure was actually caused by Saddam in collusion of the Jordanian government.  He was on his way to being the "exiled leader of the Iraqi resistance."

2) The Iraqi National Congress
So what group of resistance fighters was led by the "exiled" Chalabi?  The Iraqi National Congress.  Only the INC
(the initials are somehow very appropriate) isn't something that sprang up spontaneously among Iraqis ousted by Saddam.  Nope.  The INC was entirely created by the US.  The CIA got the group together following the directions of George H. W. Bush in May 1991 to create conditions for Saddam's removal.  Even the name of the group is a US creation.  It was coined by John Rendon, founder of the Rendon Group, a public relations firm.  There's little doubt about the pupose of the INC: it was to provide cover to US-sponsored insurrection and activities in Iraq and act as a hub for resistance that the US could direct.  To head up this creation, the US tapped someone who had no constituency inside Iraq.  In other words, someone who could be controlled.  Ahmed Chalabi.

3) The PUK and the KDP.
After the CIA assembled the INC, it provided funds to bring together dozens of different Iraqi factions and assemble them into  rough aggregation.  For a couple of years, it almost seemed that the resistance formed as a cover story, might grow up to be the real thing.  However, any chance of legitimacy for the INC ended in 1994.  The INC, Chalabi included, had been supporting Kurdish forces against Saddam, but two of the factions within the INC - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party -- began to squabble among themselves.  This factional fighting grew so bad, that by summer 1994, the KDP actually invited Saddam into Kurdish territory to help them against the PUK.  Saddam obliged, executing 200 accused PUK supporters and forcing the US to take in the tattered remains of the INC sponsored forces.  

4)  The INC as a US Mouthpiece.
The INC lost what little legitimacy it had earned after the debacle in Kurdistan, and the US turned to supporting the Iraqi National Accord under former Ba'athist Iyad Allawi for any real hope of unseating Saddam.  However, the US didn't completely drop the INC or Chalabi.  The value of the group as a hub for the resistance was gone, but it still had value as a cover for US-directed actions in Iraq.  To that end, the government provided covert funding to the INC up until 1998, and then openly funded the group to act as a US mouthpiece in railing against Saddam.

5) PNAC
The membership list of the Project for a New America Century reads like a who's who of the Bush administration.  John R. Bolton, Dick Cheney,  Lewis "Scooter" Libby,  Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz are all long time members.  From its inception, PNAC tried to push American action in Iraq.  In 1998, they sent a letter to President Clinton, stating that containment was not working, and Clinton should make it American policy to remove Saddam from power.  The agitating of PNAC and their supporters pushed more funds into the INC.  After 9/11, the members of PNAC -- many of them now with high positions in the Bush administration -- seized on an opportunity.  They decided to "reverse the flow" of the INC.  The organization had been built as a cover for US operations in Iraq.  Now it was put to use as source of data to feed back into the United States.

6) Douglas Feith
The problem with using the INC as a source of information on Iraq was simple: the CIA knew what the INC was, they created the INC.  To prevent someone from crying foul right away, they needed someone to act as a receiver for the "information" coming from the INC.  In effect, they needed a fake intelligence agency to accept the fake reports from their fake resistance movement.  The man tapped for this job was former Reagan administration Middle East official, Doug Feith, who had spent most of a decade playing lobbyist for foreign clients and foreign governments.  Feith, who had sent his own letter to Clinton urging the ouster of Saddam, had been involved with the INC almost from the beginning.  Feith had very good reasons to want another conflict in Iraq.  His firm, Feith and Zell, had already begun making contacts and gathering contracts for rebuilding Iraq. (Coincidentally, after the war, Feith was put in charge of reconstruction in Iraq.   Pretty neat, huh?)  Eager to make good on all the deals he'd been brokering, and long familiar with Chalabi, Feith was the perfect person to head up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon.   It was this office that was on the receiving end of many of Chalabi's "defectors," who brought with them juicy hints of WMD programs, including nuclear programs.   W. Patrick Lang, former DIA chief of Middle East intelligence, said it clearly "They're running Chalabi."

7) Dick Cheney
An original PNAC member,  Cheney had long ties to both Chalabi and Feith.  So it was no surprise that he formed the other end of the pipeline that started with the stories Chalabi trotted past Feith.  It was Cheney who trotted out "information" on Iraq's revived nuclear program and the looming threat of a "mushroom cloud."  Together Chalabi, Feith, and Cheney formed a neat triangle: Chalabi provided a source for the stories, Feith provided a stamp of approval, and Cheney delivered the dire warnings to the public.

8) The Puppet Plan
Though the Bush administration is often criticized for having no plan for what happened after the war, the truth is they had a very simple plan.  Using Chalabi as a source of information to start the war had been so effective, they decided to make the post-war period into the second act of the same play.  According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department, the plan was to install Chalabi in a US-created government and boogey out of Iraq so that the US could get on with invading the next country on the PNAC hit list.  There was just one problem with that plan: the Iraqis didn't buy it.  Most people in Iraq had no idea who Chalabi was.  Those who did, didn't like him.  So, the problem was post war planning wasn't that there was no plan, it was that the plan assumed the Iraqi people would be as stupid as the American people.  It turned out to be a bad bet.

9) Fool Me Once... Again
With all of the information pumped through Chalabi's organization proven false, it fell to Bush to finally admit that "It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong,''  Left and right, there are have been stories for months on Chalabi and how he "fooled" the neocons.  These have been written as if this is the story.  Evil Chalabi gave us false information and fooled our guys.

10) The Last Laugh
Now that they've been caught out, the Bush administration is giving a collective shrug.  Aw shucks, we were fooled just like the rest of you.  But let's take a quick review.  Chalabi was a fake.  The INC was a fake.  The Office of Special Plans was a fake.  And they knew it.

Chalabi never "fooled" anyone. Never tricked anyone. Never pulled a fast one. Chalabi and the INC were both US creations.   Saying that the Bush administration was fooled by Chalabi would be like saying the writer of Friends got tricked into funding a dinosaur dig led by Ross.  It's like Peter Jackson sending off a ship in search of Skull Island.

Admitting they made mistakes is just the "safety valve" on a conspiracy to defraud the people. How could they accept fictional stories, from the fictional leader of a fictional resistance movement, then claim they got taken?  By getting the public to accept their "reluctant apology" for the mistakes leading up to Iraq, Bush gets the last laugh.

There, is that clear enough?