It raised an eyebrow when US forces raided the house of Ahmed Chalabi, the chief architect of the Iraq war.
It raised the other when the US accused Chalabi of passing sensitive information to Iran.
The holyshitometer broke when US intelligence said Chalabi's false reports came from Iran.
If these allegations by the Defense Intelligence Agency are true, the entire Iraq war and the decade-long leadup thereto -- PNAC lobbying, nonexistent WMD stockpiles, stovepipes to push aside experienced analysts, Mylroie's conspiracy theories -- were all part of a plan by Iran to remove their enemy Saddam (perhaps to expand their influence through the Iraqi Shiites?), and the neocons fell for it hard.
If this report is right, Bush's #1 policy for the past two years has been to be a tool of one of the Axis of Evil nations. It also puts the lie to Bush's Axis of Evil rhetoric, though as it came from someone who didn't know there were Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq until two months before he bombed the place (link doesn't work, grep "Packer" and look up), nobody with a clue about world affairs and a working brain cell believed that line anyway.
I wonder if there are connections to any Reagan holdovers who had friendly relations with Iran stemming as far back as the 1980 campaign's interference with hostage release negotiations. While we're waiting on more information to come out, I think I'll go around my favourite webforums and call all the warhawks "traitors" and "Khamenei-lovers".
Posted by Warrior Tang at May 22, 2004 06:23 PM