An anonymous coward writes:

"Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War"

Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service

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 this 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 like al-Qaeda --
the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for the
invasion.Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), and U.S. retired Gen Jay Garner, who was in charge of
planning and administering post-war reconstruction from January through
May 2002, suggest that other, less public motives were behind the war,
none of which concerned self-defense, pre-emptive 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 U.S. public to persuade them that Hussein 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, effectively conspired with his
supporters in and around the administration to take the United States 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 Hussein's alleged WMD programs, not only to U.S.
intelligence agencies, but also to U.S. 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,
Undersecretary 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 Hussein
represented a compelling threat to the United States.

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 long-time Chalabi friend.

DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA 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 Hussein appear as scary as possible.

Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after
the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main
topic of discussion, according to the Wall Street Journal, was how 9/11
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
here this 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 this week, has
extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than
400 million dollars 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 U.S.
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 U.S. troops might remain in Iraq, Garner replied, ''I hope
they're there a long time'', and then compared U.S. goals in Iraq to U.S.
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
added.

While U.S. Military strategists have hinted for some time that a major
goal of 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, U.S. 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 Jun. 30, will make
permanent U.S. bases much less likely."