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Iraq: Now for the base
truth
By Jim Lobe
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 last
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 such as al-Qaeda - the two main reasons the US
Congress and public were given for the invasion.
Separate statements by Ahmad Chalabi, the head
of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and retired US
General Jay Garner, who was in charge of planning and
administering postwar reconstruction from January
through May 2002, suggest that other, less public
motives were behind the war, none of which concerned
self-defense, preemptive 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 Saddam 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, in effect conspired with his
supporters in and around the administration to take the
US to war on pretenses 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 Saddam's alleged WMD programs, 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 Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,
Under Secretary of Defense 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 Saddam represented a compelling
threat to the US. The OSP also worked with the Defense
Policy Board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly
neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war
by Richard Perle, a longtime Chalabi friend.
DPB members, particularly Perle, former Central
Intelligence Agency 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
Saddam appear as scary as possible.
Chalabi even
participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days
after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the
Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion,
according to the Wall Street Journal, was how the
disaster 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 rumors
circulated last 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 last week, has extensive
interests in a company that has already been awarded
more than US$400 million in reconstruction contracts, is
signaling 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 US
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 said.
While US military strategists have hinted for
some time that a major goal of the 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.
(Inter
Press Service)
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