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News :: Activism : War in Iraq
U.S. White Nationalists Prepare for the Permanent Control of Iraq
This article provides information on Ahmed Chalabi,
the U.S. puppet who is positioned to be the next
leader of Iraq. Chalabi is a thief and the darling of
the neo white nationalists (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle,
Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc.) who currently control
the U.S. government.
the U.S. puppet who is positioned to be the next
leader of Iraq. Chalabi is a thief and the darling of
the neo white nationalists (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle,
Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc.) who currently control
the U.S. government.
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U.S. White Nationalists Prepare for the Permanent Control of Iraq:
Phase One - Install the Puppets
Who is Ahmed Chalabi? He's the man that Rumsfeld, Cheney and the gang
want to force on the Iraqi people as their new leader. What is his background?
He was born in Iraq to a wealthy family, but left Iraq when he was just 11
years-old. He was educated in the United States. As an adult he went
into business for himself and ran a succcessful bank in Jordan. He would
eventually leave Jordan in a hurry after the bank failed and he was indicted
(in absentia) in Jordan for damn near bankrupting the entire country. He
then popped up in the U.S. with his stolen money and purchased his way into
the hearts of the rich and powerful, especially those of the American neo
white nationalist movement (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc.).
The fact that he was never sent back to Jordan to face trial suggests that
Chalabi's bank business was in fact a CIA operation to bankrupt the economy
of Jordan. After the first Gulf War, the American right wing added CIA money
to Chalabi's stolen money and helped Chalabi set up an "Iraqi Congress" in exile.
Why does the American right wing like Chalabi? Besides the fact that he
put some money in their pockets, he has already promised to be a "friend"
of Israel. Chalabi would like to see an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. It
also turns out that Gen. Jay Garner, the American that will run Iraq for the
Bush cabal after the "war," was heavily involved in business dealings with Israel. Therefore, Garner and Chalabi will be the "perfect" match for installing "Iraqi
Freedom." Their first move will be the holding of a phoney "conference" where there
will be an attempt to trick the Iraqi people into believing they had real input into
the installation of the puppet government.
Read some excerpts from various articles on Chalabi below. Click the
links for the full articles.
NEWS EXCERPTS ON CHALABI
A thief to run Iraq? Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), has been indicted in Jordan as a thief and fraudster for his role in the demise of one of his financial institutions in Amman. The collapse of his financial institution led to the forfeit of 10 percent of Jordan's budget for 1988. He has been sentenced to 20 years hard labor in absentia.
www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Al-Atraqchi_IraqiOpposition.htm
--------------------------------
A corollary of this prognosis was that the regime of Saddam Hussein, already on the brink of collapse, would break apart in the opening days of the US invasion.
Much of the “intelligence” on which this rosy scenario was based was apparently supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA-funded opposition-in-exile headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a close associate of Perle and Wolfowitz.
www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/perl-a02.shtml
----------------------------
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.
Is this an American Lebanon War? Tom Friedman says he is afraid it is. He was there, in the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, in the summer of 1982, and he remembers it well. So he sees the lines of resemblance clearly. General Ahmed Chalabi (the Shi'ite leader that the neoconservatives want to install as the leader of a free Iraq) in the role of Bashir Jemayel. The Iraqi opposition in the role of the Phalange. Richard Perle and the conservative circle around him as Ariel Sharon. And a war that is at bottom a war of choice. A war that wants to utilize massive force in order to establish a new order.
www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml
-------------------------------
Ahmed Chalabi.
If that name isn’t familiar yet, it will be. Although his recent return to his homeland is the first time he has set foot there since 1958, Mr. Chalabi is the dominant leader of the exile movement known as the Iraqi National Congress. Among his admirers in Washington—where he has long been a favorite of the neoconservative right—he is regarded as brilliant, selfless and courageous. Senator Joseph Lieberman has called him "a person of strength, principle and real national commitment." His friend Richard Perle, the influential Defense Department adviser, notes that Mr. Chalabi, a very wealthy man with an American education and British citizenship, "could have lived comfortably without spending a day on the effort to liberate Iraq."
That last remark is surely true. Just how Mr. Chalabi came to be fixed so comfortably remains a matter of grave concern in neighboring Jordan. Eleven years ago this week, he was convicted in absentia on more than 30 counts of embezzlement, theft and fraud after the mysterious crash of Petra Bank, a large financial institution he founded and ran in Amman. (In some profiles, this episode is described discreetly as his "controversial past.") By the time he fled, Jordan’s central bankers were trying to uncover what had happened to about $300 million in missing deposits.
Among the doubters is the impeccably conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, author of a thoroughly unflattering Chalabi profile for the Washington Times last December. Quoted in that article is the "widely respected" former governor of the Jordanian central bank, who said that after a full examination of Petra’s books, he concluded that "they had been cooked and that Ahmed Chalabi was the master cook …. Chalabi was one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East."
Aside from all those musty details, Mr. Chalabi’s critics in the C.I.A., the State Department—and other groups who have shed blood fighting Saddam Hussein—wonder how a figure with no visibility or known support among the Iraqi people is qualified to lead them. Among his pronouncements from exile, he has said that he would extend diplomatic recognition to Israel, a laudable idea that probably has very little support among the Iraqi public.
Apparently, Mr. Chalabi believes he will be best served by a long U.S. military occupation of his country. He told the CBS program 60 Minutes that he expects our troops to stay for two years.
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm
------------------------------------
The CIA, in a classified report distributed widely within the US government, argues that Mr Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon civilian leaders, and Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the Iranian based leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, have little popular support among Iraqis on the ground.
A US official familiar with the CIA report told United Press International: “This is about the Iraqi interim authority. It discusses the factors likely to effect the legitimacy and acceptability of an Iraqi transitional authority in the eyes of the Iraqi public. In part it looks at Iraqi attitudes towards the Iraqi opposition and how the INC is viewed on the inside.” When asked about the CIA report on CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” Sunday evening, Mr Chalabi said it seemed to him the agency “is more focused on me than on Saddam.”
www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp
-------------------------
AHMED Chalabi, an Iraq-born, US-educated, London-based former banker and convicted embezzler, claims to have no ambitions to be president of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
"I'm not a candidate for any position in Iraq, and I don't seek an office," he said on US television on Sunday night. "I think my role ends with the liberation of Iraq."
But if he changes his mind, he is in the right place at the right time, courtesy of the US military.
Longtime backers have included Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, although both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have been forced to distance themselves from Mr Chalabi in recent days.
Aside from the CIA, the State Department does not trust Mr Chalabi. Some detractors argue that Mr Chalabi, despite being schooled in the ways of democracy, is not a safe long-term bet.
Iraq's neighbours would not welcome him with open arms, although Jordan would like to throw him in jail.
"There's almost no one who would be worse either for Iraq or for the Arab world," The Los Angeles Times quoted an unidentified foreign minister of an Arab country as saying.
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6262907%255E26038,00.html
-------------------------------------
"The State Department wants to take off the top layer of the Baathists and keep the bureaucracy intact so they could bring stability to Iraq as quickly as possible and then start to figure out how to choose a leadership," Mackey says.
"But the hawks want to totally rid Iraq of all the Baathists. They want to have this huge purge and essentially start from scratch and install the Iraqi National Congress. What is motivating this is that Chalabi and the INC have made the very astute political decision to embrace Israel and that is why the hawks want him in power -- they see him as taking one of the threats away from Israel."
Chalabi is the most controversial of the would-be Iraqi leaders, not just because he has met with the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, but also because of his involvement in a banking scandal.
www.sptimes.com/2003/04/09/Columns/The_puzzle_of_Iraq__W.shtml
----------------------------
AHMED Chalabi is tipped as the Iraqi most likely to be appointed to the US-led administration.
Mr Chalabi, 57, is president of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella organisation for Iraqi opposition groups in exile which was formed in 1992.
A Shia Muslim, he was born in 1945 to a wealthy banking family in Iraq, but left the Arab state in 1956.
He went on to study mathematics at Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and forged a career in banking.
In 1992, he played a key role in the establishment of the INC, which received millions of dollars from the US government in the hope that it could be instrumental in toppling Saddam by an Iraqi opposition revolution.
A key question mark against his credibility is Mr Chalabi’s alleged role in the collapse of Petra Bank in Jordan in 1989. Mr Chalabi had founded Petra Bank in 1977, and as its chief executive officer, saw it become Jordan’s second biggest commercial bank. When the scandal broke, Mr Chalabi fled Jordan - allegedly in the boot of a car.
In 1992, the Jordanian courts convicted Mr Chalabi in absentia of embezzlement amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison with hard labour. However, he has always maintained his innocence, claiming the affair was a plot organised by Baghdad to frame him. . . .some within the state department and the CIA are less impressed. The US stopped pouring millions of dollars into the INC after questions were raised about the probity of its accounting.
www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm
---------------------------
Ahmed Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi opposition politics. He has a controversial past, a long list of enemies but is also politically agile, tough and persistent.
He comes from a wealthy Iraqi Shia banking family, who moved to Lebanon in 1958. From Beirut he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then to the University of Chicago where he acquired a PhD in mathematical knot theory.
He moved to Jordan in 1977 where he founded Petra Bank, which became the third-largest bank in the country. In 1989, however, the bank closed and Mr Chalabi was convicted, in absentia, of embezzling $60m (£40m), a charge he has always denied as politically motivated. He is reputed to have left Jordan in the boot of a car.
He became seriously involved in politics in 1991. He was favoured by the CIA, which liked his organisational skills and the fact that he did not have a political past that would alienate other potential opponents of Saddam Hussein. Later in the same year the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was founded, with Mr Chalabi as one of its leading lights, as an umbrella organisation for the opposition.
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/iraqcrisis/warnews102.jsp
---------------------
In 1992, Chalabi and his aides set up a base in northern Iraq that included training camps, an intelligence gathering network, and broadcast facilities. Three years later, the force had swollen to 2,500 men, mostly deserters of Iraq's regular army; in March 1995 Chalabi led an attack on two infantry brigades and took about 1,000 Iraqi troops prisoner, according to INC members. Hussein struck back a year later and, after a 14-hour battle scattered the INC and its leaders, many of whom had to smuggle themselves to safety via Turkey, Iran, and Syria.
Chalabi has since held together an unruly coalition of dissident Iraqi groups made up of Shi'ite Muslims as well as those from the minority Sunni elite, Muslim fundamentalists, monarchists, and Kurds. Several times he seemed on the brink of irrelevancy; in 1999 fundamentalist groups bolted the INC in part to protest Chalabi's high-handedness and a senior US military officer publicly expressed doubts about his credibility. Last fall, Chalabi's own aides quietly were distancing themselves from his leadership at the close of an INC meeting in London.
www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/098/nation/Pentagon_criticized_for_promoting_Iraqi_dissidents+.shtml
------------------
The insertion this week by the Pentagon of opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a tassel-loafered, London-based Shia aristocrat, into southern Iraq with a few supporters is regarded by most Middle East experts with dismay, since there is no proof Chalabi has any following inside Iraq.
The Shia are much more likely to follow the lead of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a religious leader with close ties to Iran, where he has lived in exile for more than 20 years. Al-Hakim told his followers to stay out of the war, and in an interview with Newsday last month warned that any U.S. attempt to control Iraq would meet “strong opposition.” But control Iraq is exactly what the United States intends to do for some time to come.
Arab diplomats here believe the selection of retired Gen. Jay Garner to head the reconstruction of Iraq is a sign of the administration’s inability to handle Iraq with the sensitivity that will be required for it to be successful.
Garner has ties to Israel that would go unnoticed if he were not about to become the de facto ruler of Iraq. As a civilian, Garner headed a defense contract that helped Israel develop the Arrow missile-defense system. He spent several weeks in Israel as the guest of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and in 2000 signed a statement organized by that group condemning the Palestinian Authority for violence.
Imad Moustapha of the Syrian Embassy in Washington said Tuesday that the apppointment of Garner confirms the worst fears of many Arabs that support for Israel was the real motive behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
www.cantonrep.com/index.php
--------------------------------
U.S. White Nationalists Prepare for the Permanent Control of Iraq:
Phase One - Install the Puppets
Who is Ahmed Chalabi? He's the man that Rumsfeld, Cheney and the gang
want to force on the Iraqi people as their new leader. What is his background?
He was born in Iraq to a wealthy family, but left Iraq when he was just 11
years-old. He was educated in the United States. As an adult he went
into business for himself and ran a succcessful bank in Jordan. He would
eventually leave Jordan in a hurry after the bank failed and he was indicted
(in absentia) in Jordan for damn near bankrupting the entire country. He
then popped up in the U.S. with his stolen money and purchased his way into
the hearts of the rich and powerful, especially those of the American neo
white nationalist movement (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc.).
The fact that he was never sent back to Jordan to face trial suggests that
Chalabi's bank business was in fact a CIA operation to bankrupt the economy
of Jordan. After the first Gulf War, the American right wing added CIA money
to Chalabi's stolen money and helped Chalabi set up an "Iraqi Congress" in exile.
Why does the American right wing like Chalabi? Besides the fact that he
put some money in their pockets, he has already promised to be a "friend"
of Israel. Chalabi would like to see an oil pipeline from Iraq to Israel. It
also turns out that Gen. Jay Garner, the American that will run Iraq for the
Bush cabal after the "war," was heavily involved in business dealings with Israel. Therefore, Garner and Chalabi will be the "perfect" match for installing "Iraqi
Freedom." Their first move will be the holding of a phoney "conference" where there
will be an attempt to trick the Iraqi people into believing they had real input into
the installation of the puppet government.
Read some excerpts from various articles on Chalabi below. Click the
links for the full articles.
NEWS EXCERPTS ON CHALABI
A thief to run Iraq? Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), has been indicted in Jordan as a thief and fraudster for his role in the demise of one of his financial institutions in Amman. The collapse of his financial institution led to the forfeit of 10 percent of Jordan's budget for 1988. He has been sentenced to 20 years hard labor in absentia.
www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Al-Atraqchi_IraqiOpposition.htm
--------------------------------
A corollary of this prognosis was that the regime of Saddam Hussein, already on the brink of collapse, would break apart in the opening days of the US invasion.
Much of the “intelligence” on which this rosy scenario was based was apparently supplied by the Iraqi National Congress, the CIA-funded opposition-in-exile headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a close associate of Perle and Wolfowitz.
www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/perl-a02.shtml
----------------------------
In the course of the past year, a new belief has emerged in the town: the belief in war against Iraq. That ardent faith was disseminated by a small group of 25 or 30 neoconservatives, almost all of them Jewish, almost all of them intellectuals (a partial list: Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Eliot Abrams, Charles Krauthammer), people who are mutual friends and cultivate one another and are convinced that political ideas are a major driving force of history.
Is this an American Lebanon War? Tom Friedman says he is afraid it is. He was there, in the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, in the summer of 1982, and he remembers it well. So he sees the lines of resemblance clearly. General Ahmed Chalabi (the Shi'ite leader that the neoconservatives want to install as the leader of a free Iraq) in the role of Bashir Jemayel. The Iraqi opposition in the role of the Phalange. Richard Perle and the conservative circle around him as Ariel Sharon. And a war that is at bottom a war of choice. A war that wants to utilize massive force in order to establish a new order.
www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml
-------------------------------
Ahmed Chalabi.
If that name isn’t familiar yet, it will be. Although his recent return to his homeland is the first time he has set foot there since 1958, Mr. Chalabi is the dominant leader of the exile movement known as the Iraqi National Congress. Among his admirers in Washington—where he has long been a favorite of the neoconservative right—he is regarded as brilliant, selfless and courageous. Senator Joseph Lieberman has called him "a person of strength, principle and real national commitment." His friend Richard Perle, the influential Defense Department adviser, notes that Mr. Chalabi, a very wealthy man with an American education and British citizenship, "could have lived comfortably without spending a day on the effort to liberate Iraq."
That last remark is surely true. Just how Mr. Chalabi came to be fixed so comfortably remains a matter of grave concern in neighboring Jordan. Eleven years ago this week, he was convicted in absentia on more than 30 counts of embezzlement, theft and fraud after the mysterious crash of Petra Bank, a large financial institution he founded and ran in Amman. (In some profiles, this episode is described discreetly as his "controversial past.") By the time he fled, Jordan’s central bankers were trying to uncover what had happened to about $300 million in missing deposits.
Among the doubters is the impeccably conservative journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, author of a thoroughly unflattering Chalabi profile for the Washington Times last December. Quoted in that article is the "widely respected" former governor of the Jordanian central bank, who said that after a full examination of Petra’s books, he concluded that "they had been cooked and that Ahmed Chalabi was the master cook …. Chalabi was one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East."
Aside from all those musty details, Mr. Chalabi’s critics in the C.I.A., the State Department—and other groups who have shed blood fighting Saddam Hussein—wonder how a figure with no visibility or known support among the Iraqi people is qualified to lead them. Among his pronouncements from exile, he has said that he would extend diplomatic recognition to Israel, a laudable idea that probably has very little support among the Iraqi public.
Apparently, Mr. Chalabi believes he will be best served by a long U.S. military occupation of his country. He told the CBS program 60 Minutes that he expects our troops to stay for two years.
www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm
------------------------------------
The CIA, in a classified report distributed widely within the US government, argues that Mr Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon civilian leaders, and Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, the Iranian based leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, have little popular support among Iraqis on the ground.
A US official familiar with the CIA report told United Press International: “This is about the Iraqi interim authority. It discusses the factors likely to effect the legitimacy and acceptability of an Iraqi transitional authority in the eyes of the Iraqi public. In part it looks at Iraqi attitudes towards the Iraqi opposition and how the INC is viewed on the inside.” When asked about the CIA report on CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” Sunday evening, Mr Chalabi said it seemed to him the agency “is more focused on me than on Saddam.”
www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp
-------------------------
AHMED Chalabi, an Iraq-born, US-educated, London-based former banker and convicted embezzler, claims to have no ambitions to be president of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.
"I'm not a candidate for any position in Iraq, and I don't seek an office," he said on US television on Sunday night. "I think my role ends with the liberation of Iraq."
But if he changes his mind, he is in the right place at the right time, courtesy of the US military.
Longtime backers have included Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, although both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have been forced to distance themselves from Mr Chalabi in recent days.
Aside from the CIA, the State Department does not trust Mr Chalabi. Some detractors argue that Mr Chalabi, despite being schooled in the ways of democracy, is not a safe long-term bet.
Iraq's neighbours would not welcome him with open arms, although Jordan would like to throw him in jail.
"There's almost no one who would be worse either for Iraq or for the Arab world," The Los Angeles Times quoted an unidentified foreign minister of an Arab country as saying.
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,6262907%255E26038,00.html
-------------------------------------
"The State Department wants to take off the top layer of the Baathists and keep the bureaucracy intact so they could bring stability to Iraq as quickly as possible and then start to figure out how to choose a leadership," Mackey says.
"But the hawks want to totally rid Iraq of all the Baathists. They want to have this huge purge and essentially start from scratch and install the Iraqi National Congress. What is motivating this is that Chalabi and the INC have made the very astute political decision to embrace Israel and that is why the hawks want him in power -- they see him as taking one of the threats away from Israel."
Chalabi is the most controversial of the would-be Iraqi leaders, not just because he has met with the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, but also because of his involvement in a banking scandal.
www.sptimes.com/2003/04/09/Columns/The_puzzle_of_Iraq__W.shtml
----------------------------
AHMED Chalabi is tipped as the Iraqi most likely to be appointed to the US-led administration.
Mr Chalabi, 57, is president of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella organisation for Iraqi opposition groups in exile which was formed in 1992.
A Shia Muslim, he was born in 1945 to a wealthy banking family in Iraq, but left the Arab state in 1956.
He went on to study mathematics at Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and forged a career in banking.
In 1992, he played a key role in the establishment of the INC, which received millions of dollars from the US government in the hope that it could be instrumental in toppling Saddam by an Iraqi opposition revolution.
A key question mark against his credibility is Mr Chalabi’s alleged role in the collapse of Petra Bank in Jordan in 1989. Mr Chalabi had founded Petra Bank in 1977, and as its chief executive officer, saw it become Jordan’s second biggest commercial bank. When the scandal broke, Mr Chalabi fled Jordan - allegedly in the boot of a car.
In 1992, the Jordanian courts convicted Mr Chalabi in absentia of embezzlement amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison with hard labour. However, he has always maintained his innocence, claiming the affair was a plot organised by Baghdad to frame him. . . .some within the state department and the CIA are less impressed. The US stopped pouring millions of dollars into the INC after questions were raised about the probity of its accounting.
www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm
---------------------------
Ahmed Chalabi is one of the great survivors of Iraqi opposition politics. He has a controversial past, a long list of enemies but is also politically agile, tough and persistent.
He comes from a wealthy Iraqi Shia banking family, who moved to Lebanon in 1958. From Beirut he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then to the University of Chicago where he acquired a PhD in mathematical knot theory.
He moved to Jordan in 1977 where he founded Petra Bank, which became the third-largest bank in the country. In 1989, however, the bank closed and Mr Chalabi was convicted, in absentia, of embezzling $60m (£40m), a charge he has always denied as politically motivated. He is reputed to have left Jordan in the boot of a car.
He became seriously involved in politics in 1991. He was favoured by the CIA, which liked his organisational skills and the fact that he did not have a political past that would alienate other potential opponents of Saddam Hussein. Later in the same year the Iraqi National Congress (INC) was founded, with Mr Chalabi as one of its leading lights, as an umbrella organisation for the opposition.
www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/iraqcrisis/warnews102.jsp
---------------------
In 1992, Chalabi and his aides set up a base in northern Iraq that included training camps, an intelligence gathering network, and broadcast facilities. Three years later, the force had swollen to 2,500 men, mostly deserters of Iraq's regular army; in March 1995 Chalabi led an attack on two infantry brigades and took about 1,000 Iraqi troops prisoner, according to INC members. Hussein struck back a year later and, after a 14-hour battle scattered the INC and its leaders, many of whom had to smuggle themselves to safety via Turkey, Iran, and Syria.
Chalabi has since held together an unruly coalition of dissident Iraqi groups made up of Shi'ite Muslims as well as those from the minority Sunni elite, Muslim fundamentalists, monarchists, and Kurds. Several times he seemed on the brink of irrelevancy; in 1999 fundamentalist groups bolted the INC in part to protest Chalabi's high-handedness and a senior US military officer publicly expressed doubts about his credibility. Last fall, Chalabi's own aides quietly were distancing themselves from his leadership at the close of an INC meeting in London.
www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/098/nation/Pentagon_criticized_for_promoting_Iraqi_dissidents+.shtml
------------------
The insertion this week by the Pentagon of opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, a tassel-loafered, London-based Shia aristocrat, into southern Iraq with a few supporters is regarded by most Middle East experts with dismay, since there is no proof Chalabi has any following inside Iraq.
The Shia are much more likely to follow the lead of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, a religious leader with close ties to Iran, where he has lived in exile for more than 20 years. Al-Hakim told his followers to stay out of the war, and in an interview with Newsday last month warned that any U.S. attempt to control Iraq would meet “strong opposition.” But control Iraq is exactly what the United States intends to do for some time to come.
Arab diplomats here believe the selection of retired Gen. Jay Garner to head the reconstruction of Iraq is a sign of the administration’s inability to handle Iraq with the sensitivity that will be required for it to be successful.
Garner has ties to Israel that would go unnoticed if he were not about to become the de facto ruler of Iraq. As a civilian, Garner headed a defense contract that helped Israel develop the Arrow missile-defense system. He spent several weeks in Israel as the guest of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and in 2000 signed a statement organized by that group condemning the Palestinian Authority for violence.
Imad Moustapha of the Syrian Embassy in Washington said Tuesday that the apppointment of Garner confirms the worst fears of many Arabs that support for Israel was the real motive behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
www.cantonrep.com/index.php
--------------------------------
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