The Sting, Part One

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has revealed in a new book that the Bush administration began high-level discussions of invading and conquering Iraq as soon as Bush entered the White House in January 2001.

O'Neill's description of the events is not only convincing, it is fully documented. He gave extensive interviews to the book's author, former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, and provided Suskind with 19,000 pages of documents from his two years in office, as well as an hour-by-hour diary of his experiences.

.....Among the relevant documents later sent to NSC members, including O'Neill, was one prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). It had already mapped Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas, and listed American corporations likely to be interested in participating in Iraq's petroleum industry. Another DIA document in the package, entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," listed companies from thirty countries--France, Germany, Russia, and Britain, among others--their specialties and bidding histories. The attached maps pinpointed "super-giant oil field," "other oil field," and "earmarked for production sharing," and divided the basically undeveloped but oil-rich southwest of Iraq into nine blocks, indicating promising areas for future exploration.

In an interview with Time magazine, O'Neill declared that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was "Topic A" at the first National Security Council meeting of the new administration, which he attended, on January 30, 2001. "From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out," he said. "It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"


USA Today
January 12, 2004




Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile close to many U.S. neoconservatives, headed the Iraqi National Congress (INC)—the exile party wooed by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle that was accused of feeding false intelligence to the United States about Saddam Hussein's regime.

The darling of the neo-conservative hawks around Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Chalabi had long been touted by his champions here as the future leader of a democratic Iraq, if not its ''George Washington''.

In a November 2003 profile, the Post contrasted the views about Chalabi expressed by Bush administration critics like Lang with those of supporters like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former CIA director James Woolsey. Lang opined that Chalabi was "a fake, one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people"; McCain called him "a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart"; and Woolsey said, "He's a class act" (Washington Post, November 24, 2003).

..................A participant at the meeting, who asked not to be named, recalled that Chalabi made a compelling case that the Americans would have an easy victory there: 'He said there'd be no resistance, no guerrilla warfare from the Baathists, and a quick matter of establishing a government under him. Bush was desperate to invade Iraq and Chalabi was his manna from heaven'"

Ahmed Chalabi,
a profile,
Wall Street Journal
February 2, 2005




The Bush administration's disenchantment with its onetime favorite Iraqi client, Ahmad Chalabi (search), has centered on the explosive allegation that he and his associates may have forwarded highly classified U.S. information to the Islamist government in Iran. Specifically, Chalabi and his cohorts are accused of informing Tehran (search) that the United States had broken the communications code of Iran's intelligence service.



.................It is well established that much of the information that Chalabi's organization, the Iraqi National Congress (search), supplied to the United States in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was erroneous. The inaccurate intelligence was most evident with regard to the vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein's regime supposedly possessed, but it also involved assurances that U.S. forces would be welcomed as liberators and that the post-Saddam political transition would be rapid and easy.
The conventional wisdom is that Chalabi was the architect of that campaign of disinformation. But what if he was not the source but merely the channel for it? Is it possible that Iran used Chalabi and his organization to lure the United States into invading and occupying Iraq?


Fox News
Did Iran use Chalabi to lure U.S. into Iraq?
June 13, 2004



An urgent investigation has been launched in Washington into whether Iran played a role in manipulating the US into the Iraq war by passing on bogus intelligence through Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, it emerged yesterday. Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq.
According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions.
The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate Mr Chalabi's contacts in the Pentagon to discover how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands.
The implications are far-reaching. Mr Chalabi and Mr Habib were the channels for much of the intelligence on Iraqi weapons on which Washington built its case for war.
"It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."



The Guardian
U.S. intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into invasion
September 25, 2004






The unraveling of the Bush administration's script for political transition in Iraq began with a fatwa. The religious edict, handed down in June by Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, called for general elections to select the drafters of a new constitution. He dismissed U.S. plans to appoint the authors as "fundamentally unacceptable."
His pronouncement, underestimated at first by the Bush administration, doomed an elaborate transition plan crafted by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer that would have kept Iraq under occupation until a constitution was written, according to American and Iraqi officials involved in the process.

........."The plan to install our guys to run the country and set up their political system and constitution was stopped dead by Sistani" said Bremer's deputy. "If we didn't give him elections we were faced with an new fatwa demanding we leave Iraq. We were now facing elections against the guys Sistani was backing, people we'd been calling terrorists a few months before."

Washington Post
How Iranian cleric trumped U.S. plan for Iraq
November 26, 2003




Asked more about the Badr corps, Rumsfeld said there are reports of numbers in the hundreds operating in Iraq and more on the Iranian side of the border. He described the corps as "the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)" and said it is "trained, equipped and directed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRG)." As yet, he said, the corps has not done anything that would be perceived by the coalition as hostile. But "the entrance into Iraq by military forces, intelligence personnel or proxies not under the direct operational control of General Franks will be taken as a potential threat to coalition forces" he said.

Rumsfeld said the coalition would hold the Iranian government responsible for the corps' actions, and armed Badr corps members found in Iraq "will have to be treated as combatants."

U.S. Department of Defense press release
Rumsfeld warns Iranian Badr corps not to interfere in Iraq
28 March, 2003






There is little doubt about who is Iran's primary proxy in Iraq: the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. This fundamentalist Shiite faction was founded in the early 1980s by Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
The Quds Force, a special branch of the Ayatollah's Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, created and trained the Supreme Council's armed wing, the Badr Corps, for the express purpose of eventually serving as an arm of the Quds Force in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

BBC
October 18, 2003




BAGHDAD — The triumph of a Shiite Muslim slate in Iraq's national elections is a victory for one of the nation's most enigmatic figures and a consistent critic of U.S. policy: senior cleric Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim.
Hakim leads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most powerful party on the United Iraqi Alliance slate, which claimed more than half the seats in the transitional National Assembly.
Other parties in the alliance include the Badr corps, the armed wing of SCIRI which is now being incorporated into the Iraqi security forces, Al-Maliki's Dawa party, and the movement of Moqtada Al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric. The UIA slate was put together by Grand Ayatollah Sistani as an Islamist bloc to contest the election.

L.A. Times
February 14th, 2005