Iran-contra redux and some general incompetence

Some nice speculations about secret proxy army activities. There is a bizarre group in Iraq today called the Mujahideen e-Khalq, who hate the Iranian government. But they are basically a matriarchal cult with a couple dozen tanks. And they have been ranging around from US-controlled territory, Iraq, into Iran to cause... terrorism? After all, they're officially a 'terrorist organization,' and hence one of those 'enemies of civilization' and all that.

So this is what's interesting. The neoconservative planners tend to favor horrible little proxy armies to do their bidding. This was our opium-oriented "Northern Alliance," who stabilized the Afghan province so well. (Heh) It was also the strategy Ariel Sharon used with the Phalangist militia in Lebanon (of Sabra and Shatila massacre fame). And we know that a few of the neocons, namely Michael Ledeen and Eliot Abrams, were perjurous architects of the Iran-Contra scheme. Ledeen hates Iran passionately, and Abrams lied to Congress about it. There's been word that Ledeen has re-opened contact with an Iranian arms dealer, Manucher Ghorbanifar, the very same arms dealer who brought those missiles into the Islamic republic.

Could schemers be shifting weapons around, to use against Iran? More specifically, could the neo-cons be encouraging the MEK and giving them harbor? (Bush doctrine ultra-sin!) The Jewish newsletter Forward wrote back in June that

A small Pentagon planning office under fire for its alleged manipulation of intelligence on Iraq is also dealing with other countries in the Persian Gulf, including Iran, raising concerns among critics about the shaping of Bush administration policy in this sensitive region. Defense Department spokesmen acknowledge that a small, four-member team is working on Iran policy within the Pentagon's so-called Office of Special Plans. Critics contend that the office has been distorting intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda in order to strengthen the case for war. Even now, however, some hawks are pressing the administration to engage the group and possibly use it as a proxy against the Tehran regime.

"The Office of Special Plans has been willing to reach out to the MEK and use them as a surrogate to pressure Iran," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA and State Department official who has been among those alleging pressure on analysts by Pentagon hawks to skew intelligence on Iraq. The senior Defense Department official strongly denied the allegations, contending that the Office of Special Plans had in fact advocated cracking down on the MEK. He said the ensuing policy confusion was due to other government agencies.

And so, these months later, the neocons have biffed the job. It seems that they didn't get to planning the post-Baathist fourth phase of the war! As leftie Alex Cockburn says on Counterpunch, "Matchlessly Wrong About Everything: Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!":

Now here we are on the downslope of 2003 and George Bush is learning, way too late for his own good, that the neo-cons have been matchlessly wrong about everything. One can burrow through the archives of historical folly in search of comparisons and still come up empty-handed. The neo-cons told Bush that eviction of Saddam would rearrange the chairs in the Middle East, to America's advantage. Wrong. They told him it would unlock the door to a peaceful settlement in Israel. Wrong. They told him (I'm talking about Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians at DoD) that there was irrefutable proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq. Wrong. They told him the prime Iraqi exile group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, had street cred in Iraq. Wrong. They told him it would be easy to install a US regime in Baghdad and make the place hum quietly along, like Lebanon in the 1950s. Wrong...

Now many are gloating at the neo-cons' discomfiture and waiting for their downfall. Click go Madam Defarge's knitting needles as she waits beside the guillotine. Here come the tumbrils, inching their way slowly through the rotting cabbages and vulgar ribaldry of Republican isolationists. Here's a pale-faced Douglas Feith. Up goes the fatal blade, and down it flashes. Behold, the head of a neo-con! The next tumbril carries a weightier cargo: Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams. Still not enough. Madam Defarge knits on and her patience is soon rewarded. Here come Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, the latter defiantly jotting a coda to Rumsfeld's Rules. They are cleanly dispatched and the crowd moves off to torch the Weekly Standard and string up its editor, Bill Kristol.

Oh no, even the militant Washington Times is givin some to the Pentagon's policy bombs. Of course, we don't necessarily have to reach for conspiracies to determine that their policy planning has simply been incompetent:

The Pentagon's policy-making shop is getting internal criticism for failing to predict the ongoing guerrilla war in its planning for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, military officials say.

The officials, who requested anonymity, also said the intelligence community failed to paint a full picture before the war of the sorry state of Iraq's infrastructure and basic services such as drinking water and sewage treatment.

Much of the inside-the-Pentagon criticism is directed at Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who has coordinated postwar planning. "Feith's star is falling," one Pentagon insider said of the Georgetown University-educated lawyer who worked in the Reagan administration. This official said Mr. Feith pushed to make Saddam's suspected weapons of mass destruction the No. 1 rationale for going to war on March 19. That argument has suffered as search teams have failed to find any such weapons.

...Pentagon officials told of rushed prewar planning last winter, as one arm of the policy shop made post-Saddam blueprints of which others had no knowledge. Some nondefense agencies simply skipped planning meetings. While the war plan went off with few snags and produced a quick victory, the "Phase IV" plan was not solidly in place when Baghdad fell April 9.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, told Mr. Wolfowitz at a hearing last week: "It's clear that the Bush administration was not ready for what took place after the Iraqi regime collapsed. ... We were unprepared, totally unprepared, for what's happened out there in Iraq in terms of giving adequate protection for American troops."

...A secret report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff last month gave a low grade to planning for Phase IV. "Late formation of DoD [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination," said the report, prepared by the chiefs' planning arm, the Joint Staff. "Command relationships (and communication requirements) and responsibilities were not clearly defined for DoD organizations until shortly before [the war] commenced."

So then, what will it be? A conspiracy to attack Iran (or at least move around arms), or else the continued implementation of really poor defense policies?

Posted by HongPong at September 21, 2003 03:47 PM
Listed under Iraq .