The invasion of Iraq has destabilized Iraq and brought Shiite political parties with long and close ties to Iran into power in Iraq, while destroying the power of the Sunni and Baathist enemies of Iran. So all in all, it’s worked out pretty well for the mullahs, but was this awful result mere serendipity?
Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?
WASHINGTON — Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have “been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service … to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government,” a Senate Intelligence Committee report said Thursday.
A top aide to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, however, shut down the 2003 investigation into the Pentagon officials’ activities after only a month, and the Defense Department’s top brass never followed up on the investigators’ recommendation for a more thorough investigation, the Senate report said.
The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.
Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces.
This follows the classic pattern of the Bush administration: the fuck-up (being the stooge of a foreign intel op) followed by the cover-up (killing the investigation into the matter).
Front and center as the witless conduits of foreign intelligence efforts are the familiar names of two of the leading dimbulb warpimps responsible for pushing the Iraq invasion:
According to the report, Ledeen, however, persisted, presenting then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith with a new 100-day plan to provide, among other things, evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly had been moved to Iran — Saddam Hussein’s archenemy.
Ledeen, who regularly receives foot massages from Trainwreck’s Roger Simon, was really on top of things, though:
When the CIA and the State Department discovered that Ledeen and Ghorbanifar were involved, they opposed any further contact with the two. Ledeen’s contacts, the Defense Human Intelligence Service concluded, were “nefarious and unreliable,” the Senate committee reported.
Bear this in mind the next time Ledeen advocates nuclear strikes on Iran.
The name Ahmed Chalabi should fit into this story. Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who was promoted by the Neocon numbnuts at the Project for a New American Century (Bill Kristol’s intellectual sewer) as Iraq’s George Washington. As I write today, I find the PNAC’s website reads:
“This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible,”
but the site once contained the PNAC’s lengthy hagiography of Chalabi, and an homage to his integrity and the value of his intelligence apparatus.
Of course, this was before it was determined that the information Chalabi provided to gullible neocon warhawks was purposely false and misleading, based on unreliable (and often drunken) sources, before Chalabi was accused of spying for Iran, and before Chalabi’s most recent notoriety, when earlier this month he was fired from his government post due to “his murky ties to Iran, including leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s internal security force.” An earlier Salon.com piece on “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons” touched upon both Chalabi’s influence with the PNAC hawks who steered administration towards invading Iraq, and his ties with Iran’s leadership. A money quote: “”Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat,” from former ally Marc Zell.
Bellicose, feckless and duped is no way to run our foreign policy.
