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theapportioner theapportioner is offline
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Old Mar 31st, 2003, 10:40 PM        Art: US draws up secret plan to impose new regime on Iraq
More sketch....

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US draws up secret plan to impose new regime on Iraq

Brian Whitaker and Luke Harding in Sulaimaniya
Tuesday April 1, 2003
The Guardian

A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate period after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.

The government will take over Iraq city by city. Areas declared "liberated" by General Tommy Franks will be transferred to the temporary government under the overall control of Jay Garner, the for mer US general appointed to head a military occupation of Iraq.

In anticipation of the Baghdad regime's fall, members of this interim government have begun arriving in Kuwait.

Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government, has had to accept the inclusion of a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

The most controversial of Mr Wolfowitz's proposed appointees is Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, together with his close associates, including his nephew.

During his years in exile, Mr Chalabi has cultivated links with Congress to raise funds, and has become the Pentagon's darling among the Iraqi opposition. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is one of his strongest supporters.

The state department and CIA, on the other hand, regard him with deep suspicion.

Mr Chalabi had envisaged becoming prime minister in an interim government, and is disappointed that no such post is included in the US plan. Instead, the former banker will be offered an advisory job at the finance ministry.

A senior INC official said last night that Mr Chalabi would not countenance a purely advisory position. The official added: "It is certainly not the INC's intention to advise any US ministers in Iraq. Our position is that no Americans should run Iraqi ministries. The US is talking about an interim Iraqi authority taking over, but we are calling for a provisional government."

The revelation about direct rule is likely to cause intense political discomfort for Tony Blair, who has been pressing for UN and international involvement in Iraq's reconstruction to overcome opposition in Britain as well as heal divisions across Europe.

The Foreign Office said last night that a "relatively fluid" number of British officials had been seconded to the planning team.

Last week Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, told Congress that immediately after the fall of President Saddam's regime, the US military would take control of the Iraqi government.

His only concession was that this would be done with the "full understanding" of the international community and with "the UN presence in the form of a UN special coordinator".

By imposing Mr Chalabi and his clique on the official administration-in-waiting, Mr Wolfowitz seems to be trying to appease the INC leader, even at the risk of annoying Gen Garner and those in Washington who consider him unsuitable for a senior post.

Mr Chalabi is former chairman of the Petra Bank in Jordan which collapsed, bringing ruin to many of its depositors. He was eventually convicted of fraud in his absence by a Jordanian court, though he maintains he is innocent.

Mr Chalabi has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a short period organising resistance in the Kurdish north in the 1990s, and is thought to have little support inside Iraq.
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The_Rorschach The_Rorschach is offline
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Old Mar 31st, 2003, 11:17 PM       
No offense to you CLA. . .But I highly doubt that the Guardian was able to gain access to any TS/SCI materials or convince personnell with accress to throw them a bone, regardless of any Divisions In the Bush Administration. Certainly nothing as sensitive as this would be accessable to anyone who did not have the administrations full faith and support. I'm guessing the leak was either contrived entirely, or possibly intentional for a few reasons:

One; It isn't true, it will discredit the paper, and make anything else reported by the source hereafter questionable.

Two: It would illustrate that the liberals are alarmist and out of touch with reality, a reputation attack which will certainly have greater ramifications later.
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Old Apr 1st, 2003, 12:30 AM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by The_Rorschach
Two: It would illustrate that the liberals are alarmist and out of touch with reality, a reputation attack which will certainly have greater ramifications later.
So this will make the liberals in general alarmist and out of touch, not just the editors of the Guardian?

I really don't know why I am setting myself for more flames from you against my intelligence by asking a question. Guess I'm just a masochist.
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Old Apr 1st, 2003, 02:39 AM       
Just sounds like more speculation being reported as a hot scoop.

I mean god forbid this actually somehow turns out good for Iraq in the long run. I'm not sure they're ready for democracy, but I can't even imagine they're going to miss all those Saddam billboards and portraits.
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Old Apr 1st, 2003, 03:04 AM       
"So this will make the liberals in general alarmist and out of touch, not just the editors of the Guardian?"

One is the other right? How often are conservatives equated with the rabid foaming of "Spin-O-Matic" 'Reilly? How often are Christians blamed for the views of Buchanan and Falwell? Its guilt by association, and typical, just for you, strawman tactics which have proven extremely successful in the past.

It will be even worse for any journalist who tries to seek confirmation on this story because they will be treated with the contempt they rightly deserve for believing such tripe. Anyone quoting the article in conversation will look foolish later on when none of it comes to pass.

Red herring, is the term I believe.

edited
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Old Apr 1st, 2003, 09:13 AM       
SECRET!

CONSPIRACY!

SECRET!

CONSPIRACY!
__________________
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Old Apr 1st, 2003, 11:50 AM       
Naldo has turrets syndrome, but won't work 'blue'.

I agree that no story hot of the presses, regardless of it's source, has much credability right now. I treat this report with the same grain of salt I gave the chemical weapons factory we recently fought for only to find it was no such thing, and the SCUD missiles that weren't SCUDs.

With most of the news coming out right now, time will tell what's true and what isn't. If this turns out to be how we govern Iraq, we'll certainly know.
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Old Apr 2nd, 2003, 12:31 AM       
To my knowledge, regarding the war I don't recall any print article that has been proven to be fabricated or was blatantly misleading. Don't watch TV news, so I can't comment on that. Of course I'm excluding Saddam's garbage. Regarding Max's examples of the Najaf factory and the putative Scuds, no one reported false information as far as I could tell. My beef was with media spin.

As far as hot scoops are concerned, one word: Watergate.

Here's a profile of this man Chalabi from the BBC:

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Thursday, 3 October, 2002, 13:53 GMT 14:53 UK
Profile: Ahmed Chalabi


Chalabi: controversial opposition maverick

Ahmed Chalabi is one of the best known Iraqi opposition figures in the West.

As leader of the one of the foremost opposition movements, the Iraqi National Congress [INC], the 57-year-old former businessman has even been tipped by some analysts as a possible successor to Saddam Hussein.

A Shia Muslim born in 1945 to a wealthy banking family, Mr Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has lived mainly in the USA and London ever since, except for a period in the mid-1990's when he tried to organise an uprising in the Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

The venture ended in failure with hundreds of deaths. Soon after, the INC was routed from northern Iraq after Saddam's troops overran its base in Arbil. A number of party officials were executed and others - including Mr Chalabi - fled the country.

Chequered career

A seasoned lobbyist in London and Washington, who studied mathematics at Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr Chalabi is often described as a controversial figure, charismatic and determined but crafty and cunning at the same time.



I am not seeking any positions. My job will end with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam's rule

Mr Chalabi has been accused by some opposition figures of using the INC to further his own ambitions.

There are also allegations of financial misdemeanours. In 1992, he was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison with hard labour for bank fraud after the 1990 collapse of Petra Bank, which he had founded in 1977.

Although he has always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited later when the State Department raised questions about the INC's accounting practices.

Cometh the man?

In recent interviews, Mr Chalabi has discounted the possibility he will take a role in any future government.

"Personally, I will not run for any office, and I am not seeking any positions. My job will end with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam's rule," he is quoted as telling the German daily Die Zeit.

He has called for a coalition government to transform the country into a democracy with a federal structure representing all ethnic groups.

He has strong backing among some sectors of Congress and the Pentagon, but is thought to have little grassroots support in Iraq and a number of opposition groups have sought to distance themselves from the INC.

Mr Chalabi subscribed to the "three-city plan", which called for defectors to capture a number of key areas, isolating and surrounding Saddam.



Not even qualified to run a grocery shop

Al-Watan - Qatar
But the plan had little support from Arab governments, which said they would not allow Mr Chalabi to run a liberation army from their soil.

In 1998, the then US president, Bill Clinton, approved a plan to spend almost $100m to help the Iraqi opposition - principally the INC - to topple Saddam.

But only a fraction of the money was ever spent, and the INC subsequently suffered leadership infighting.

Mr Chalabi now says the movement is united. But many people are sceptical.

According to the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan, Mr Chalabi and his movement "are failures and are not even qualified to run a grocery shop".
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Old Apr 2nd, 2003, 12:38 AM       
I've only done a quick search on this guy, but everything I've turned up seems consistent -- the Guardian's story seems entirely plausible. See the mention of the State Department, CIA, Cheney, Rumsfeld etc. below. From the National Review.

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June 20, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
After Saddam
The controversy over Ahmad Chalabi.

By Max Singer



hile much attention is paid to the consensus in Washington that Saddam Hussein must be replaced, the debate over his successor has largely been hidden.

Yet the question of who would replace Saddam is a critical component of U.S. strategy, both with respect to how Saddam should be ousted and the American vision for the Middle East.











The debate over who should succeed Saddam begins with Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi opposition movement, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). People who know him well think he has the potential to be one of the great Arab leaders of this century. But there are widely divergent judgments about Chalabi among senior American policymakers and among those counted as experts on the Middle East.

The State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and the experts associated with them believe that Chalabi is a small-time opportunist and playboy trying to use his position in the INC to make something for himself.

They recognize that he is intelligent and charming, but believe that he is of dubious integrity and without the qualities required for leadership and respect in the Arab world, or the strength to lead either a revolution or a new government. A prominent exception to this pattern is James Woolsey, who was the director of the CIA part of the time it was helping the INC, and does not share these negative views.

But first, the undisputed facts. Chalabi is from one of the old powerful and wealthy Baghdadi families which were forced into exile when the Baath Party seized power in 1958. He studied at MIT and then earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1969. Rejecting opportunities at American universities, he returned to the Arab world to teach mathematics at the American University in Beirut, where he met his wife, the daughter of one of the signers of the Lebanese declaration of independence.

Chalabi is a modern man of the West, who founded a successful software company in London and who understands democracy deep in his bones. What makes him truly exceptional is that he also continues to be deeply a man of the East, with the sensibilities and loyalties of his ancient Baghdad Arab and Muslim roots. Because of the family connections that still count for so much in the Middle East, he is comfortable negotiating with Sunni tribal sheikhs and Shia ayatollahs, familiar with the patterns of relationships that go back generations and form the structure of Iraqi and Arab politics.

In 1978 he opened the Petra bank in Amman, Jordan, in which he invested much of his capital and which was very successful until it was seized by the Jordanian government in 1989. The State Department and the CIA often say Chalabi's bank was seized because he had improperly diverted assets, and note the Jordanian government claim that Chalabi was wanted for questioning and that the bank failed some time after it was seized.

On closer examination, however, the story of Chalabi's supposed Jordanian scandal does not hold water. Those familiar with the facts say the bank was seized because Chalabi had been using its international connections to obstruct Iraq's efforts to finance its war with Iran. As a result, Saddam put pressure on Jordan's King Hussein to close the bank. This view is consistent with the official report of the Jordanian officer assigned to seize the bank, the fact that much of the money lost was Chalabi's own, that it was Crown Prince Hassan who protected Chalabi by personally driving him to the border when the bank was seized, that King Hussein held four friendly public meetings with Chalabi (the last in 1998), and that the king subsequently worked to restore Chalabi's position in Jordan.

It is likely that the best-informed people at the State Department and CIA know better, and yet find it useful not to debunk the anti-Chalabi story. We must look elsewhere, then, to discern the real reason for the bureaucratic antipathy to Chalabi.

After the Gulf War the CIA was trying to arrange a coup against Saddam by Iraqi generals in Saddam's inner circle. They believed that such a coup would become more likely if there were a small domestic political opposition movement which might be a reason or an excuse for the generals to remove Saddam. The CIA had already created an opposition organization called the Wifaq that they controlled and which was composed of former Iraqi military officers and former Baathist Party leaders. They recognized, however, that the Wifaq lacked political credibility and so they offered to help Chalabi create a new organization called the "Iraqi National Congress." The agency thought Chalabi would create a small and tame propaganda organization that would not cause too much trouble, but Chalabi created a genuinely representative Iraqi political organization that was independent and that decided it wanted to fight to overthrow both Saddam and his whole regime.

With support from the CIA and more than $10 million of his own and his family's money, Chalabi's INC created an open political opposition movement in northern Iraq from 1993-1996, operating newspapers, radio stations, and a lively political process involving Iraqis from all parts of the country. It also created a small military force that succeeded — with help from one of the Kurdish militias — in attacking and destroying two divisions of the Iraqi army.

Despite later loose charges to the contrary, the money received by the INC from the U.S. was well-accounted for and spent with extraordinary efficiency, greatly impressing many Congressional visitors who came to see for themselves, and making some of the Americans brought by the CIA to work with the INC among the most loyal of Chalabi's supporters to this day.

It is a mark of Chalabi's character that he has gained such a large band of volunteer advisers and supporters not only among Iraqis but also in England and the US. And despite being as fractious a group as any set of exile political figures, and quite diverse, the Iraqis who have joined the INC have continued to keep Chalabi as their clear leader despite the year-long effort of the State Department to find an alternative under the cover of "broadening and unifying the opposition."

Chalabi's admirers today also include leading academic experts on the Middle East who have known him well for many years, such as Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese Arab who is the author of the much-admired book The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Bernard Lewis, probably the premier scholar of Islam in the world. A number of U.S. senators have also come to know him, including Joseph Lieberman and Trent Lott.

Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz all know from their personal contact with Chalabi — and their own checks of his background — that the State/CIA view of him as a small-time exile opportunist of shady character is wrong. They believe, on the contrary, that Chalabi is a man who has the character, vision, and strength needed to become an outstanding leader who can help move the Arab world away from the path of anti-American and backward-looking tyranny and toward a path of struggle toward modernity and democracy. If their assessment of him is sound, Chalabi could be the key figure in the success of President George W. Bush's new policy against terrorism, tyranny and threats of biological and nuclear war.

Differences of emphasis and nuance in the judgment about key facts and personalities are natural, but the gap in understanding between State and CIA on one side and Chalabi's admirers on the other is impossibly wide.

One side or the other must have the facts wrong. And the question of which group is correct about Chalabi is crucial for U.S. policy. Bush should do whatever he needs to do to decide who is right and to make a policy decision about whether the U.S. is going to support Chalabi. We cannot afford to take the chance of sacrificing such a decisively valuable potential partner out of reluctance to come to grips with an uncertainty, especially one that seems to be the product of bureaucratic enmities and Saudi fears of what would happen if a great Arab democrat came to power nearby.

— Max Singer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
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Old Apr 2nd, 2003, 12:56 AM       
Well of course Chalabi will be involved. How is that a scoop? He represents a group that formed to replace Saddam's government. I can't imagine every member of that same group commited white collar crimes like he did. The point that he stole money sounds legit... but why shouldn't Iraqi exiles have a place in a future government there? I mean it might not be the best idea, but why is that being mentioned as some point to prove corruption? There's something wrong about how this "scoop" was reported.
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Old Apr 2nd, 2003, 10:17 PM       
The Guardian's a left-leaning newspaper generally speaking -- that's their slant. The "scoop" is the details of those 23 ministries -- the rest is background information obviously.

Discussion of post-war Iraq should have been central to the pre-war dicussions, and deserves more scrutiny than it has been getting, since the long-term future of a country and its relationships with the United States, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. etc. etc. are at stake. Instead, we get pictures of big explosions and Saddam death rumors.

I personally am very deeply skeptical of the kind of job the United States (with or without the UN) will do there, and I want other people to recognize the crucial importance of this question.
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The_Rorschach The_Rorschach is offline
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Old Apr 3rd, 2003, 03:17 AM       
"Discussion of post-war Iraq should have been central to the pre-war dicussion. . ."

No. Thats the single most short-sighted comment I've heard uttered today, no disrespect intended CLA. War should never, firstly, have been regarded as a foregone conclusion - which it would have to necessitate dwelling on a post-war Iraq. We had other options, and if we'd had a real president, one of them might have been embraced before war.

Secondly, thats assuming we're going to win this war. How long did Russia fight with Afghanistan? How successful was she? It is not inconcievable that we could very well lose this engagement, or more accurately be suckered into a conflict of such duration and casualty loss that we are forced to resigned altogether, and with Bush purposely trying to force nations into either aiding him or the enemy, he is going to continue alienating potential allies and possibly create dangerous antagonists.

Third, who knows how much infrastructure will be lost in the war, what figured will be alive or interested or capable of assuming leadership roles when the war ends. How can we possible try and figure out what the puzzle should look like upon completion without even having the pieces yet?

As an aside, I personally believe the more of an influence we have in the design of their post-war governmental heirarchy or design, the more criticism we will receive from the international community.
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Old Apr 3rd, 2003, 08:07 AM       
Since this war is one of pre-emptive regime change, and since its purported benefit is to "free" the Iraqis, it's only reasonable that we should have delved more deeply into the possible nature and composition of the postwar government. After all, the "justness" of a war depends on the benefits versus the costs -- how are we to make this decision when the future that we envision for Iraq is completely blind to us? The administration should not have claimed that they are going to turn Iraq into a good ol' democracy without showing us how they intend on doing it.

Leaving it until later, and then letting whatever happen, can't change history -- the war will have already occurred, a regime changed. But after the fights are over, American sense of responsibility to that country may dissipate, to which I imagine people shrugging their shoulders.

It presupposes victory, but I don't think it would make us any cockier (Iraq may think otherwise, but they think otherwise regardless). And sure it should be flexible, and may completely change. I'm just saying that when you prescribe a medication to treat an illness, the potential consequences (and we can't predict them all, but we can try) need to be taken into account first.
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