It is not often that one finds one's views confirmed by independent knowledgeable sources but this was the case this past month. I have always maintained that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not a direct threat for the United States. Israel was in the potential line of fire and it was, therefore, in Israel's interest to eliminate Saddam. This had been a priority for the supporters of that country ever since the inconclusive Iran-Iraq war, which had left Saddam with a modern army and chemical as well as biological weapons. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was designed to get rid of the vast debts he had accumulated during the war with Iran. But he had no designs on Saudi Arabia as had been claimed by our media in order to justify not only sending but keeping our troops there. This was known to the Israeli government (Israel's Secret Wars; Black and Morris), but whether or not this information was passed on to the CIA and the first Bush administration has never been revealed. Saddam's military might was severely decimated in the first Gulf war, and the international sanctions thereafter led to the decay of the infrastructure of the country we are now faced with. But although he was not regarded as a threat by his direct neighbors (none of whom, apart from Kuwait, condoned our March invasion) his continued existence in power could not be tolerated by the Likud government and some members of the Bush administration.

Saddam stood in the way of Greater Israel by encouraging the Palestinians' use of force, including rewarding suicide bombers' families, thereby thwarting Likud's plans to quietly annex as much of the West Bank and Gaza as possible. For the Bush administration oil was a major factor but in addition there was the personal issue of Bush II who had to prove that he knew better how to deal with tyrants than his dad. Thus, the neocons (see April 1, 2003 The Neocons' Leviathan) were chafing at the bit and saw immediately in the 9/11 tragedy an opportunity to make tabula rasa in the Middle East. Afghanistan was a side show for the neocons who from day one had argued that Iraq, Iran and Syria have to be dealt with in line with the document prepared in 1996 for the incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, "A Clean Break. A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" (also April 1, 2003). The connection between this document and our present situation is that it was written by the same people who rose to power in the U.S. after the November 2000 elections. They are now the chief architects of our foreign policy which is, at least as far as the Middle East is concerned, no longer in the hands of the State Department but in that of the civilians in the Department of Defense and the Defense Advisory Board. Within these groups Richard Perle and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz are the most important people. They managed to recruit the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-president Cheney and in due course our President to their cause. It is, therefore highly appropriate that The Jerusalem Post of October 3, 2003 should have on its title page the face of a joyful Wolfowitz and the caption, "Rosh Hashana 5764 Paul Wolfowitz. Man of the year."

One article which details why he deserves this honor is prefaced by, " No question: this was Paul Wolfowitz's year. On September 15, 2001 at Camp David, he advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad. In March 2003, he got his wish. In the process, Wolfowitz became the most influential US deputy defense secretary ever - can you so much as name anyone else who held the post? And he's on the shortlist to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state." A second article entitled "Invasive treatment" is prefaced, "In 1979 [sic] he warned that Iraq would invade Kuwait. In 2001, he told the president to train his sights on Baghdad, not Kabul. Now Paul Wolfowitz is getting his way. Will he be proven right?" That indeed is the question and the newspapers as well as the Internet are currently full of pictures of a rather shaken Wolfowitz after the rocket attack on the Al Rasheed hotel earlier in the week where he narrowly escaped from being hit.

But Wolfowitz should really have shared the honor with Mr. Perle as became apparent in a "Frontline" documentary, "truth, war and consequences," aired by PBS. The transcript is available on the Internet (www.pbs.org/wghb/pages/frontline/shows/truth/etc/script.html). Several highly revealing statements how American foreign policy was made since September 11 can be found there. Perhaps the most dramatic one was the casual way in which some people with influence can put words into our president's mouth and thereby make national policy. Here is an excerpt of the broadcast,

"NARRATOR: Ever since the end of the Gulf war a small group of influential policy makers has wanted to rid the Middle East of Saddam Hussein. But going to war to achieve it was not politically feasible until after September 11^th, 2001.

RICHARD PERLE: Well I believe there was a strong argument for looking at Iraq before September 11^th. What September 11^th taught us is that we can wait too long in the presence of a known and visible threat.

NARRATOR: On the afternoon of September 11^th, Richard Perle, phoned one of President Bush's speechwriters, David Frum.

RICHARD PERLE: I had a conversation with David.

NARRATOR: And what was the content of that?

RICHARD PERLE: That we are not going to deal effectively with global terrorism if states can support and sponsor and harbor terrorists without penalty.

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts.

NARRATOR: At 8:30 that evening, President Bush spoke to the nation. He laid out his policy, echoing the words that Perle had suggested to his speechwriter earlier in the day.

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."

The full interview with Mr. Perle (July 10, 2003) from which these excerpts were used for the Frontline program is available at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/perle.html. During that interview Perle repeatedly made the case that if the Iraqi National Congress (INC) under the leadership of Ahmad Chalabi had been given a free hand by the State Department most, if not all, of the present problems in Iraq would have been avoided. Mr. Perle kept insisting that Chalabi is "quite brilliant. He is a Ph.D. in mathematics, with a background at the University of Chicago and MIT. He's a Shi'a, committed to secular democracy." According to Mr. Perle the State Department refused to accept Mr. Chalabi's qualifications as future leader of Iraq and actively sabotaged the Defense Department's efforts to create a stable Iraq under Chalabi as soon as the Saddam regime had been deposed. In the interview Mr. Perle also asserted that what is being called a separate intelligence operation within the Defense department under Wolfowitz and his deputy, Douglas Feith, had become necessary because the CIA simply did not want to see all the damning evidence against Saddam which they had no problem finding. But more about this later when we return to the October PBS broadcast.

There is one additional statement from the Perle interview which I found revealing. After the interviewer had asked Perle point blank: "If you had your choice, he [Chalabi] would still be the person we should be backing," Perle gave him an unequivocal yes. When the interviewer followed up with, "People say that we should listen to people who actually lived in Iraq during the regime," he got this irate reply, "Oh, this is complete rubbish. It would be hard to imagine a sillier argument. Iraq was a place where, if you were an opponent, you were dead. Now how are we supposed to find people in Iraq that we can talk to, and whose judgment we can repose any confidence in? People who kept secret and managed to survive their opposition to Saddam all theses years? What are we talking about?"

This answer shows that either Mr. Perle is "spinning," to make a case for his protegé, or that he has no idea how people, who do not agree with government policies, survive in dictatorships. I happen to know something about this because Hitler was no joy to live under either when you were one of the many who loathed his government. We were not all killed provided we kept our mouths shut and our noses to the grindstone. People put on blinders, concentrate on the tasks daily living requires and stay clear from any political statements. This is the uniform response regardless what the name of the country or the dictatorship is. Survival comes first and to state that anybody who managed to survive inside the country is automatically disqualified from leading a post-Saddam government is either blinded by dogma, or has some other ulterior motive.

Now that we know how Mr. Perle feels about Dr (?) Chalabi let us look at the man through the eyes of BBC which aired a program on October 3, 2002 "Profile: Ahmed Chalabi," also available on the Internet. An excerpt reads as follows,

"Ahmed Chalabi is one of the best known Iraqi opposition figures in the West.

As leader of one of the foremost opposition movements, the Iraqi National congress [INC], the 57-year-old former businessman has even been tipped by some analysts as a possible successor to Saddam Hussein.

A Shia Muslim born in 1945 to a wealthy banking family, Mr. Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has lived mainly in the USA and London ever since, except for a period in the mid-1990's when he tried to organise an uprising in the Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

The venture ended in failure with hundreds of deaths. Soon after, the INC was routed from northern Iraq after Saddam's troops overran its base in Irbil. A number of party officials were executed and others - including Mr Chalabi - fled the country.

Chequered career

A seasoned lobbyist in London and Washington, who studied mathematics at Chicago University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr Chalabi is often described as a controversial figure, charismatic and determined but crafty and cunning at the same time.

Mr Chalabi has been accused by some opposition figures of using the INC to further his own ambitions.

There are also allegations of financial misdemeanours. In 1992, he was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison with hard labor for bank fraud after the 1990 collapse of the Petra bank, which he had founded in 1977.

Although he has always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited later when the State Department raised questions about the INC's accounting practices.

Cometh the man?

In recent interviews Mr Chalabi has discounted the possibility he will take a role in any future government.

'Personally, I will not run for any office, and I am not seeking any positions. My job will end with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam's rule,' he is quoted as telling the German weekly Die Zeit. . . He has strong backing among some sectors of Congress and the Pentagon, but is thought to have little grassroots support in Iraq and a number of opposition groups have sought to distance themselves from the INC.

Mr Chalabi subscribed to the 'three-city plan', which called for defectors to capture a number of key areas, isolating and surrounding Saddam.

But the plan had little support from Arab governments, which said they would not allow Mr Chalabi to run a liberation army from their soil.

In 1998, the then US president, Bill Clinton, approved a plan to spend almost $100m to help the Iraqi opposition - principally the INC - to topple Saddam.

But only a fraction of the money was ever spent, and the INC subsequently suffered leadership infighting. Mr Chalabi now says the movement is united. But many people are sceptical.

According to the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan, Mr Chalabi and his movement 'are failures and are not even qualified to run a grocery shop [bold print added].' "

This report leaves us with a choice. Do we believe Mr. Perle, who has an obvious agenda, or the BBC, which has a well deserved reputation for excellence in reporting? There are several interesting aspects in this article. Although Mr Chalabi did study at Chicago and MIT he apparently does not hold a doctorate as intimated by Mr. Perle. Furthermore, it is now apparent why the State Department and the CIA washed their hands of Mr. Chalabi after the failed Kurdish uprising and his questionable accounting practices. In addition it may have been this "three-city plan" which my informant in August of 2002 had in mind when he told me about the removal of Saddam which was to take place as the political coup of the year just prior to the November 2002 mid-term elections (see October Surprise?, September 2002). As far as Mr. Chalabi's promise is concerned that he would not seek political office after Saddam had been removed it was technically correct. He did not have to "seek" it or "run for office" because Mr. Perle's friends in the Pentagon appointed him and he is currently in charge of Iraq's Governing Council.

Now back to "truth, war and consequences" in order to learn how the information was obtained upon which the president led the country to war.

"NARRATOR: When it came to Iraq, the special intelligence office [the group who worked for Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith] didn't trust what the CIA or even their own Defense Intelligence Agency had to say. They did apparently listen to Ahmad Chalabi. According to one Pentagon source, he visited once every other month. Across the Potomac, Greg Thielmann had analyzed intelligence for the State Department for seven years.

GREG THIELMANN, U.S. Dept of State (1977-02): That office was largely invisible to us in the intelligence community because they didn't-- they didn't play in the - - in the normal bureaucratic process of making intelligence assessments and reporting on those assessments.

MARTIN SMITH [interviewer of Richard Perle in July 2003]: What did you understand that office to be about?

GREG THIELMANN: I am still trying to figure out what that office was about. The office wasn't big enough for them to really have the expertise in-house and the mere creation of the office was odd, since the secretary of defense had the entire Defense Intelligence Agency at his disposal. So it's a little mysterious what exactly they were doing.

RICHARD PERLE: Let me blunt about this. The level of competence of the Central Intelligence Agency in this area is appalling. They had filtered out the whole set of possibilities because it was inconsistent with their model. So if you're walking down the street and you're not looking for hidden treasure, you won't find it.

MARTIN SMITH: Conversely, if you look for something, you will find it simply because you are looking. And the nature of intelligence is -- is very often vague, and things can be interpreted one way or another.

RICHARD PERLE: Of course. There's no absolute truth in this."

This was the way how we got into Iraq. In the neocons' view all the professionals in the State Department, the CIA, the FBI and the Defense Department were incompetent because they could not come up with evidence that Saddam was linked to Al-Quaeda and thereby 9/11, had WMD's, and was an imminent threat to the United States. A handful of specially selected people had to go over old data from the mentioned agencies as well as unverified information supplied by Chalabi to provide a "true picture" of the danger we were in. This was the version which was fed to the Vice-President as well as the President who used it to convince the country of the necessity to invade Iraq.

But there is more to this tug of war between the State Department and the defense neocons as the PBS program revealed. While the Pentagon group was busy trying to find justification to bring the country to war the State Department was planning for the aftermath. It established in the spring of 2002 the "Future of Iraq" project because the decision to go to war had already been made by president Bush in March. Since Saddam's army was no match, the outcome was never in doubt, only the pretext had to be found and allies recruited.

The State Department gathered 200 Iraqis to form 15 working groups. These were concerned with how to get everyday functions up and running once Saddam had been deposed. As Edward Walker from the State Department said "There are committees set up to consider each aspect of the future life of Iraq and how you could deal with it in the immediate days thereafter. It involved an awful lot of very bright people, many of whom have the credentials in economics and banking and agriculture and so on . . . ." But Chalabi and the INC were not interested and felt that a committee structure would turn into a debating society which was not the way to solve the problems. They wanted to be recognized as a government in exile. This notion went against the grain of other opposition groups, as well as the State Department, because it was felt that a government should consist mainly of local Iraqis rather than a group coming in from the outside. In this tug of war between Chalabi and the Pentagon on one side, and the State Department on the other, the president came down firmly on the Pentagon's side in January 2003, when he gave it the authority for post-war reconstruction All the work the "Future of Iraq" team had done was disregarded and Lt. General Jay Garner who was put in charge had to start from scratch. During the invasion in March 2003 Chalabi was flown with an "army" of 700 supporters to Iraq where they intended to participate in the march on Baghdad. Since his reception by the locals was far from gratifying, and there was opposition to starting a democracy with an image of a warlord arriving, the U.S. army sidelined him. He didn't get to Baghdad until five days after the city had fallen. General Garner and his crew also had to twiddle their thumbs in Kuwait because the situation on the ground was regarded as too unstable to have the reconstruction team come in. Thus, there was no authority whatsoever, because the American troops were stretched too thin and in addition had no orders to intervene with the looting.

We cannot blame the troops on the ground. The fault lies with the arrogance of the civilians in the Defense Department who ignored all the warnings from the professionals. They first relied on Chalabi who fed them rumors, obtained from paid defectors, which they promptly sent on to Cheney and Bush bypassing the traditional channels. Since the war needed to be justified to the country and the world at large anything that made Saddam a supposed threat to the United States was touted far and wide while the usual qualifiers of genuine intelligence were omitted. Thus, the war was based entirely on wishful thinking while disregarding professional advice.

The immediate post-war chaos including massive looting was predicted on basis of actual experience. Robert Perito who had served on the National Security Council Staff, during 1988 - 1989 gave a presentation to Pentagon officials, upon invitation of Mr. Perle, where he warned about the potential post-war violence. Talking about the experience in Panama he said in the mentioned PBS program, "As soon as the fighting ended, mobs went into the streets of Panama City and destroyed Panama City, looted the city, did more damage to the Panamanian economy than the conflict did. And so my presentation was largely about the kinds of forces that we would need in order to deal with that kind of violence. And those lessons were ignored." But the post-war looting was of no concern to Rumsfeld because as he told us, "Stuff happens!"

There was an additional report about the pre-war search for justification. In the October 27, 2003 issue of The New Yorker Seymour Hersh wrote an article, " THE STOVEPIPE. How conflicts between the Bush Administration and the intelligence community marred the reporting on Iraq's weapons." It confirms what has been reported above but there was also an item which was of special interest to me in regard to the forged documents purporting the sale of enriched uranium to Iraq. In The Niger Forgery (August 1, 2003) I discussed the question who might have had the means, motive and opportunity to commit this crime. It seemed reasonable that the Mossad's LAP department whose task is "psychological warfare, propaganda and deception" might have had a hand in it. Since I do not have access to classified information I merely put forth the suggestion for someone who is "in the loop," or an investigative reporter, to follow through with getting at the truth of that forgery. It had, after all, found its way into the president's State of the Union Address in January of this year. Here is Seymour Hersh's assessment,

"The F.B.I. had been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. 'This story could go several directions,' he said. 'We haven't got anything solid and we've looked.' He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But 'somebody's hiding something, and they're hiding it pretty well.' "

President Bush was elected on the promise to bring common decency back to the White House, which had been sullied by the private conduct of its former occupant. But decency requires first of all honesty. Yet, this administration has been highly secretive. The Cheney deliberations on the country's energy problem have not been allowed to become public. Documents pertaining to the run-up of 9/11 are not being released to Congress, and the FBI is stymied in its pursuit of the truth in regard to a forged document which was used to paint the picture of an impending mushroom cloud over our country. Since this conduct is even worse than that of Mr. Clinton because it involves all of our lives, and not just private sexual gratification, the American people and Congress should take note and demand an accounting. Eventually the truth will come out and the president is doing neither himself nor us any good by hiding behind "national security" or "executive privilege." We are all grown-ups, we can handle the truth whatever it is, and we should not be treated like children who can't be trusted.

The last word should go to Mr. Thielmann. When asked in the mentioned PBS program "Were we told the truth?" he answered, "The administration made statements which I can only describe as dishonest." Since the Iraq situation is in the near future only going to go from bad to worse scapegoating will soon start. Mr Rumsfeld may come in for hard times first. But the problem did not start with Rumsfeld. He succumbed to a siren song by Perle, Wolfowitz and others of their belief system. It is indeed tragic that hardly any one in a position of responsibility is as yet publicly facing up to, "you cannot serve two masters." When the interests of the ruling party of the state of Israel are identified with those of the United States no good can come of it. President Eisenhower's defense secretary, who had been CEO of General Motors and was nicknamed Engine Charley Wilson, said "what's good for GM is good for the country," and he genuinely believed it. Now we have people in charge of decisions which not only affect our country but the entire world, who genuinely believe that what's good for the policies of Likud is good for America. It is this delusion which has to be exposed so that we can get an administration which works for the good of all and not mainly special interests, especially those which benefit a foreign country to the detriment of ours.