Chalabi, Garner provide new clues to war

By Jim Lobe

http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en54969&F_catID=&f_type=source

WASHINGTON: For those still puzzling over the whys and
wherefores of Washington’s invasion of Iraq 11 months
ago, major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were
offered this week by two central players in the events
leading up to the war.

Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the
Bush administration’s drive to war in Iraq had very
little, if anything, to do with the dangers posed by
Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like Al
Qaeda - the two main reasons the US Congress and public
were given for the invasion.

Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the
Iraqi National Congress (INC), and US retired Gen Jay
Garner, who was in charge of planning and administering
post-war reconstruction from January through May 2002,
suggest that other, less public motives were behind the
war, none of which concerned self- defence, pre-emptive
or otherwise.

The statement by Chalabi, on whom the neo-conservative
and right-wing hawks in the Pentagon and Vice-President
Dick Cheney’s office are still resting their hopes for
a transition that will protect Washington’s many
interests in Iraq, will certainly interest
congressional committees investigating why the
intelligence on WMD before the war was so far off the
mark.

In a remarkably frank interview with the London ’Daily
Telegraph’, Chalabi said he was willing to take full
responsibility for the INC’s role in providing
misleading intelligence and defectors to President
George W. Bush, Congress and the US public to persuade
them that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United
States that had to be dealt with urgently.

The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off
accusations his group had deliberately misled the
administration. "We are heroes in error," he said.

"As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely
successful," he told the newspaper. "That tyrant Saddam
is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said
before is not important. The Bush administration is
looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our
swords if he wants."

It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel
growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose
INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over
the past decade, effectively conspired with his
supporters in and around the administration to take the
United States to war on pretences they knew, or had
reason to know, were false.

Indeed, it now appears increasingly that defectors
handled by the INC were sources for the most
spectacular and detailed - if completely unfounded -
information about Hussein’s alleged WMD programmes, not
only to US intelligence agencies, but also to US
mainstream media, especially the ’New York Times’,
according to a recent report in the New York ’Review of
Books’.

Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely
with those who had championed his cause for a decade,
particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and
Rumsfeld - Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
Undersecretary of Defence Douglas Feith and Cheney’s
chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Feith’s office was home to the office of special plans
(OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants
were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop
the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a
compelling threat to the United States.

OSP also worked with the defence policy board (DPB), a
hand- picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks
chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a
long-time Chalabi friend.

DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director
James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich,
played prominent roles in publicizing through the media
reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence
developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as
possible.

Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just
a few days after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on New York
and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion,
according to the ’Wall Street Journal’, was how 9/11
could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq.

The OSP and a parallel group under Feith, the Counter
Terrorism Evaluation Group, have become central targets
of congressional investigators, according to aides on
Capitol Hill, while unconfirmed rumours circulated here
this week that members of the DPB are also under
investigation.

The question, of course, is whether the individuals
involved were themselves taken in by what Chalabi and
the INC told them or whether they were willing
collaborators in distorting the intelligence in order
to move the country to war for their own reasons.

It appears that Chalabi, whose family, it was reported
this week, has extensive interests in a company that
has already been awarded more than 400 million dollars
in reconstruction contracts, is signalling his
willingness to take all of the blame, or credit, for
the faulty intelligence.

But one of the reasons for going to war was suggested
quite directly by Garner - who also worked closely with
Chalabi and the same cohort of US hawks in the run-up
to the war and during the first few weeks of occupation
– in an interview with ’The National Journal’.

Asked how long US troops might remain in Iraq, Garner
replied, "I hope they’re there a long time," and then
compared U.S. goals in Iraq to US military bases in the
Philippines between 1898 and 1992.

"One of the most important things we can do right now
is start getting basing rights with (the Iraqi
authorities)," he said. "And I think we’ll have basing
rights in the north and basing rights in the south ...
we’d want to keep at least a brigade."

"Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the
20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy,
and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the
Pacific. That’s what Iraq is for the next few decades:
our coaling station that gives us great presence in the
Middle East," Garner added.

While US military strategists have hinted for some time
that a major goal of war was to establish several bases
in Iraq, particularly given the ongoing military
withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, Garner is the first to
state it so baldly.

Until now, US military chiefs have suggested they need
to retain a military presence just to ensure stability
for several years, during which they expect to draw
down their forces.

If indeed Garner’s understanding represents the
thinking of his former bosses, then the ongoing
struggle between Cheney and the Pentagon on the one
hand and the State Department on the other over how
much control Washington is willing to give the United
Nations over the transition to Iraqi rule becomes more
comprehensible.

Ceding too much control, particularly before a base
agreement can be reached with whatever Iraqi authority
will take over June 30, will make permanent US bases
much less likely. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.