The Chalabi affair: the truth is NOT out there... yet

[Capt_Nemo]

So who is closer to the truth on this one?
I think that everyone should read Crispin Black's article
on today's Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224810,00.html

The most relevant points:

"At first sight it seems rather a tall story. Seducing the Americans into invading Iraq to get rid of your old (but much weakened) enemy, Saddam Hussein, might make the Iranians appear fiendishly clever. But with US forces already in Afghanistan it also completed the American strategic encirclement of Iran - an extraordinarily risky strategy for a theocratic regime that is deeply unpopular. And the mullahs could never be sure that, once Iraq was secured, President Bush might decide to apply direct military pressure on them."

"The conspiracy theory also has another weakness. It assumes that intelligence was the crucial driver in President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. I doubt it was that instrumental. The president made a wide-ranging case for an invasion of Iraq of which intelligence was just a part."

"Most of the time the UK's intelligence position on any matter, including the celebrated "dossiers", is likely to be at least partly built on the American point of view. In the end it does not matter whether Washington has been duped by the Iranians or whether the US intelligence community is having one of its periodic bureaucratic turf wars - either way the spillover will have affected the UK's intelligence machinery for the worse."

I share the skepticism of the author, but does that mean I don't
believe that Chalabi has, at least at some point, worked for Iran?
Hell, no! Chalabi's services are at sale for the highest bidder and
he'll do the bidding for several masters at the same time. The more,
the merrier his pockets will be, filled up with cash!
And, what's more, everybody would have known it: the neo-cons, the iranians,
etc. "Who cares it is us that will prevail in the end!", all of them
thought...
Chalabi is a con artist right out of a John Le Carré novel. Life
imitating art, as Oscar Wilde would say.
But this so-called secret is now being used and "sexed up"
(That thing of US state secrets passed to Tehran sounds implausible
at the very least. How would Chalabi get hold of them?) by the CIA as a weapon in a turf war it wages against the PNACers.

What seems to me likely to have happened is mentioned in this other
Guardian article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1224824,00.html

"The CIA knew, as Bob Baer makes clear, that Chalabi had close Iranian connections. They knew that before the war he had meetings with Iranian intelligence officials, including the Revolutionary Guard intelligence official responsible for Iraq, General Sirdar Jaffari."

"Baer, who served in the CIA outpost in the mid 1990s, says that "a lot of people in the CIA believe that the Iranians used Chalabi, and or Arras, to manipulate us into a war. Maybe they just thought they were steering us to keep up the pressure on Saddam, keeping him under sanctions and no fly zones, never dreaming that he would actually get the US to go to war and put the US army right on the Iranian border. It's the law of unintended consequences.""

So Iran would have indeed used
Chalabi since the '91 war to get the americans to keep the pressure
on Iraq by use of air and naval power alone, the regime change
being carried out by Iraqi factions that once took the power would
switch allegiances from the US to Iran. But then Iran got more
than it bargained for (blowback!) when neo-cons came to power and
those ground forces would be many tens of thousands
of GI's crawling up at Iran's borders. Chalabi didn't mind, by hook
or by crook he would get Saddam out of his way.

The end result is that Chalabi's double agent game has turned out to
be a blowback both for Iran and for the PNACers. The problem for the
US is that, as things stand, Iran still has room for manouver to steer
Iraqi political game to their advantage, while the US has none.

[Veggie Meathead]

1. I think this fingering of Chalabi as the endgame approaches in

Iraq is to give him the veneer of a guy who can gain credibility in Iraqi eyes as a true patriot who can stand up to the Americans.After the Americans or their mercenaries finish off Chalabi's rivals in the IGC,he will step as the savior of Iraq.He will then be the designated puppet of his American and Israeli masters.It is important he go through this phase of falling out of bed with the Americans;otherwise his days as the Shah of Iraq, would be numbered.

Note that because he has a warrant for his arrest in Jordan on embezzlement charges permit Americans or Israelis for that matter to arrest him and extradit him to Jordan.He is not in a position to do anything against the interest of either of these countries. The most telling point in this charade is why he has not yet been arrested.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Interesting theory

[Capt_Nemo]

3. That is a possibility, although would suppose another high risk gamble

with very few chances of working. By now one would think the neo-cons
would know better. Maybe they don't...

On edit: I know about the Petra bank affair and all but to sell
Chalabi as an iranian puppet instead of an american one seems a
pretty stupid way of propping him up among Iraqis, particularly
because there are those that undoubtedly have conections with
Iran (like Sistani) and would unmask the whole thing instantly.