Bollettino

The good news is that LI appears to be wrong about the neo-con support for Chalabi. We misread the appointment of Chalabi’s nephew as the chief prosecutor of Saddam Hussein – it signified, not the recrudescence of the old reprobate, but his last hurrah – at least as Wolfowitz’s favorite Iraqi.

This is good. But irony always follows at good news at a mocking distance. Chalabi’s pronouncements, during the last month, have made a lot of sense. The Iraqi government needs to take control of its money and its foreign policy, come June 30. Anything else will be a farce.

For a good look at how crooked Chalabi is, the reader should check out Andrew (or is it Patrick?) Cockburn’s article at Counter-Punch. Entertainment can also be extracted from the NYT article and the WP article, neither of which mention the role they played in puffing Chalabi, with Judith Miller in the NYT being notorious in her guileless belief in the wonderful stories spun by the man – which, incidentally, corroborated what her friend Laurie Mylroie was saying, while Sally Quinn’s article about what a sexy devil this Arab we can deal with can be was a sort of high point of neo-con chic – Chalabi having learned how to Mau Mau a few flak catchers himself as he tripped from one party to another in Republican D.C. See our November 24, 03 post, and this link. Quinn’s article is such a pip that it is worth saving. Memorials of the madness, or what I did during the Bush years.