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If you are
looking for my blog items on the IQ by State hoax, click here.
[Update,
11/4/04: By the way, if you are interested in this topic, you are
probably also interested in my big scoop story from October 2004 on how
John Kerry and George W. Bush compare in IQ, as indicated by their
scores on IQ-like military aptitude tests. The original story is here.
A follow-up story putting the whole question of presidential IQ in
historical perspective is here.
You can read all sorts of reactions to my study, including the interview
where Tom Brokaw asked John Kerry about my article here
in my October blog archive. (Just scan down through my blog items for
lots of good material mixed in with irrelevant stuff.) And, you can read
what Kerry told Tom Brokaw off camera about why his score might have
been worse than Bush's here.
Finally,
I'm going to be adding material on IQ and the new 2004 elections on my
blog at www.iSteve.com. So check in
periodically.]
"The
Genetic Origins of Personality:" A fun piece of
pseudo-science from David Schlinkert:
This
paper deals with the genetics behind the eternal questions: Why are all
men jerks and why are nice guys so boring? The reader may note that
these two questions are mutually exclusive, but empirical observations
have lead the researchers to believe all women have asked these
questions and firmly believe they are both valid.
Our
research shows there are two gene pairs controlling the major character
traits in men: the jerk/nice pair and the interesting/boring pair. There
are sixteen possible combination of these pairs... [Here are three
excerpts:]
jJiI
[Inherits both Jerk genes and Interesting Genes from both parents] --
homogeneous for jerk, homogeneous for interesting -- 6.25% of all men
These
are the REAL MEN. Most attractive to women, highly successful in life.
Frequently have careers they can't talk about, and incidents they won't
admit to. Always one steps ahead of the law and past lovers. Rarely
marry, unless in politics, but frequently leave children behind to be
raised by lesser males...
nNiB
& nNbI -- homogeneous for nice, heterogeneous for
interesting/boring -- 12.5%
Marries
late, if at all, mainly because women rarely notice them. Has a life
outside of work, but you'll never listen long enough to find out.
Devoted to wife and family, when married. Nice guys at all levels that
do 90% of everything necessary to keep the world going...
nNiI
-- homogeneous for nice, homogeneous for interesting -- 6.25%
Cultured,
educated polymaths. Equally at home at the opera and the wilderness.
Riveting conversationalist, great cook. Kind, loving, committed. Gay.
***
No
Fun in the Sun -- A second summer in Iraq is beginning, with the
temperature climbing daily. By next Monday, June 7, the Baghdad high
temperature is expected to hit 109.
Whatever they are paying our soldiers over there, it's not enough.
***
Daughters
and Las Vegas -- Families are flocking to Las Vegas to benefit from
the booming economy, sunshine, and moderate housing prices. There's just
one question: Are they nuts? Especially if they have daughters.
Consider Chris Rock's wise advice to his fellow fathers of daughters:
"Your job is to keep them off the pole." Rock says he won't
have a playset in his backyard because they come with too many poles.
The
NYT runs an article
on a juvenile court judge in Las Vegas whose teenaged daughter has
become a total skank, and it has dawned on him that maybe Las Vegas
isn't the best place to raise a daughter.
But
it's not just Las Vegas. What's the cause of the self-poleification of
young American women? I remember back in the Eighties when I was a
yuppie in Chicago, stripping was simply not on the social radar screen.
Something happened during the Nineties to set off the current wave of
female exhibitionism, but what was it? The collapse of feminism? The
Internet? The proliferation of television channels?
One
theory a reader suggested is the rise of hip-hop videos on MTV. The
quintessential Eighties video -- Robert Palmer's "Addicted
to Love" with supermodels pretending to play guitars in little
black New Year's Eve dresses -- seems quaint today. Rappers like Snoop
Dogg brought the pimp style to MTV along with their attendant strippers.
***
New
VDARE.com column
at left...
***
The
Neocon Invade-the-World/
Invite-the-World platform. The
Bush Administration's combination of unilateral aggressive war and open
borders never made much sense even in terms of internal consistency.
After all, if, as revenge for 9/11, you are going to go beat up a
country that wasn't involved in 9/11, inviting the furious survivors to
move here and take the jobs "Americans just won't do" is
clearly just asking for trouble. Indeed, the French tried the same
policy in the 1950s -- importing as guestworkers the cousins of the
Arabs the French Army was torturing back in Algeria
-- and they are still paying the price today
***
Beach
Book -- I just finished Stephen L. Carter's The
Emperor of Ocean Park, a ponderous but curiously engrossing
detective meganovel. Carter is a prominent Yale law professor, one of
the few black public intellectuals in America who doesn't write
primarily about race. For example, one of his nonfiction books deplored
the judicial nomination process, and, sure enough, the narrator of this
book is the son of a famous black conservative Supreme Court nominee
(like Clarence Thomas) who was voted down by the Senate (like Robert
Bork) because he was caught in a lie about some unsavory connections
(like LBJ's buddy Abe Fortas).
After
his father's death, the dour, prissy narrator (a law professor at a
college much like Yale) discovers that his father had left him a cryptic
message that various scary people want him to decode. The who-dunnit is
vastly complex and there really should be an index so you can more
easily hunt down the countless clues that are dropped throughout the the
660 large format pages. One problem with the ending is that it took
Carter so long to write it that by the time he finished, there was a
Republican rather than a Democrat in the White House, messing up one of
the motivations in a book concerned with judicial nominations.
I'm
not a connoisseur of detective novels, but Carter also provides an
interesting picture of his small world of the black upper middle class,
the inbreeding group that summers in the black section of Martha's
Vineyard.
Carter
a practicing Christian, a skeptic about affirmative action, and a man
who cuts a formidable figure as a speaker, is likely himself to be
nominated for the Supreme Court someday, if the political planets are in
alignment where the nomination of a political centrist is called for.
The novel rather reads like it was written by somebody who doesn't want
to foreclose his shot at the big prize, but, nonetheless, the book is as
impressive as Carter is.
***
Shrek
2 -- A decent movie, but was I missing something or did they
leave out about 75% of the jokes? The kids in the theatre seemed to like
it, but they sure didn't laugh much. The adults chuckled a little more,
but it still was a long ways from being a laff riot. But it's making
money at an insane rate, so I guess it's generating great word of mouth
-- it must be one of those movies where the gags sound funnier when your
friends tell them to you than they do up on the screen.
Also,
am I the only person in America who's tired of Hollywood spoofing
Hollywood? When the kingdom of Far, Far Away is revealed to be fairy
tale version of Beverly Hills, am I the only person whose heart sank? It
was a fresh idea when Jed Clampett rolled into town, but isn't it
getting a bit tired?
***
Chalabi's
Cheerleaders go on the offensive: The NYT reports:
Last
Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation
of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the
national security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt
change of heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about
the course of the war in Iraq. The group included Richard N. Perle, the
former chairman of a Pentagon advisory group, and R. James Woolsey,
director of central intelligence under President Bill Clinton...
Although
Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been caustic in
their comments about his treatment, there has been relative silence
so far from Mr. Chalabi's supporters within the administration.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in
Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to numerous
requests this week for an interview.
***
"A
Day Without A Mexican" The June 21st issue of The
American Conservative is now readable by subscribers to its electronic
edition. An excerpt from my film review:
Currently
playing mostly in Hispanic neighborhoods in California, "A Day
Without a Mexican" is a fairly amusing cross between a
"Twilight Zone" parable and one of Christopher Guest's
satirical mockumentaries. It depicts what might happen if one sunny
morning, all twelve million Latinos in the Golden State suddenly vanish
into a purple haze, leaving inept gringos behind to bunglingly paint
their own houses, wash their own cars, and scrub their own toilets...
The
movie is unlikely to strike a nerve among people in the immense regions
of the country where Americans take for granted that they will do all
those jobs that upper-middle class Californians assume "Americans
just won't do." Nor will the movie convince the general public that
Los Angeles is actually better off for having been inundated with
illegal immigrants. The film metaphorically asks: What would LA look
like if the federal government had been serious about enforcing the law?
Like
Seattle with sunshine?
The
rest of the review takes a rather serious look at the issue of Latino
separatism raised by Samuel P. Huntington's new book Who Are We?
***
Pollkatz
is back! The best source for opinion poll data has gone back online
after several months presumably earning a living. Somebody named Stuart
Eugene Thiel charts all the major Bush-related poll results on a
scatterplot. This graph
shows that over the 40 months of his Presidency, Bush's Approval rating
drifted downward except for three boosts: 9/11 and the subsequent Afghan
victory, the initial Iraq Attaq, and the capture of Saddam. Also, here's
Bush's Approval
/ Disapproval spread -- it turned clearly negative for the first
time ever in the last couple of weeks.
***
The
Neocons' Favorite Mother Theresa-Hating Marxist Defends his Crush on
Chalabi -- Christopher
Hitchens explains that he was impressed that "whenever I
mentioned any name, Chalabi was able to make an exhaustive comment on
him or her." Perhaps Chris should have gotten exhaustive comments
on Chalabi from those who knew Ahmad-the-Thief's
works. The problem with the neocon fantasy of ordinary Iraqis dancing in
the streets to proclaim Chalabi ruler of Iraq by acclamation like George
Washington or Charles De Gaulle was that Iraq is right next door to
Jordan, where Chalabi defrauded
a sizable fraction of the populace of their life savings. Lots of folks
in Iraq had relatives or friends in Jordan who had been impoverished by
Chalabi.
***
Mookie
al-Sadr gets his Fallujah Deal -- It looks like we've agreed once
again, just like with the Sunni bravos in Fallujah, to let bygones be
bygones with the Shi'ite bravos under Muqtada al-Sadr in Najaf. We'll
mostly just sit in the outskirts and let the Iraqis runs the city. The
military is quite pleased that they didn't have to Dresdenize Fallujah,
and a full scale American assault on the ultra-sacred Shi'ite shrines in
the center of Najaf could have been a hearts and minds catastrophe of
nearly-global proportions for the U.S.
The
WaPo
reported:
After
weeks of urban fighting in southern Iraq, U.S. troops suspended attacks
on Shiite Muslim insurgents Thursday in response to an offer by rebel
cleric Moqtada Sadr to partially withdraw militia forces from the holy
city of Najaf and evacuate government buildings. Sadr's
offer, made in writing to Shiite mediators and passed to U.S. occupation
authorities, fell far short of the requirements U.S. commanders have
said Sadr must meet before they would suspend efforts to subdue the
insurgency. During Sadr's seven-week revolt, U.S. officials repeatedly
demanded he disarm his Mahdi Army militia and give himself up to Iraqi
courts to face charges of murdering a moderate cleric last year.
Hey,
that gives me a crazy idea -- maybe we should extend this apparently
successful local policy to the whole country! We could just sit in in
our bases in Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, plus our aircraft
carriers and let the Iraqis run Iraq. In the extremely unlikely event
that they decide to invade a neighbor again, we just use our absolute
air superiority to nip it in the bud.
Below
is a crazier idea -- Why don't we let the Iraqi people vote in a
referendum on whether they want us to continue to liberate them or not?
***
A
New Iraq Exit Strategy
The
Clash Referendum: Should
we stay or should we go?
If
we go there will be trouble.
An'
if we stay it will be double.
The
U.S. is in a bind in Iraq because we don't want to be seen as being
driven out by a bunch of punks with RPGs before we establish democracy.
On the other hand, nobody really believes anymore that we can establish
an enduring, working representative government there.
So,
why don't we let the Iraqis democratically vote us out of Iraq? Let's
announce that we will abide by the will of the Iraqi people as expressed
in a national referendum on, say, June 30. The ballot will have just one
question on it:
Should
we stay or should we go?
If
the Iraqis vote "go," then we go (within, say, 60 days). In
leaving, we give the Arab world an impressive object lesson in how the
United States of America believes in democracy and the rule of law. We
leave with our honor intact.
If
they vote "stay," well, then we're stuck there, but at least
we've shown the world we're wanted.
Greg
Cochran came up with the idea. He argues that a referendum can be pulled
off more quickly and peacefully than an election because when you have
different candidates running for office, their militias will be sure to
start shooting each other. But a referendum is simple enough for people
with no experience at (or talent for) self-rule to deal with.
***
The
Wedding Party Massacre in Perspective -- My friend Jerry
Pournelle (among much else, an artillery captain in some of the
worst fighting in the Korean War) explains why that kind of horror is
inevitable:
Let
me limp up and say it again: Armies break things and kill people. If you
do not want things broken and people killed, keep the army in barracks.
If you put the Army into an unfriendly country, things will be broken
and people killed.
It
is no good trying to change the nature of the Army so that it doesn't
break things and kill people because if you do you won't have an Army
any longer.
Now
you would think anyone with any historical sense could understand this,
just as you would think that anyone with any sense at all could have
predicted this sort of thing would happen once we sent the Army into
Iraq, and that it will happen again if we keep it there. And all
the sensitivity training in the world won't change that: the incidents
will continue to happen, only now we will have a Sensitive New Age Army
that won't be as good at breaking things and killing people when things
really need breaking and people really need killing.
Sorry
for shouting, but apparently it needs shouting.
***
NYT:
"Good
Teachers + Small Classes = Quality Education" -- Somebody
named Michael Winerip confidently announces in the the NYT:
The
secret to quality public education has never been a big mystery. You
need good teachers and you need small enough classes so those teachers
can do their work. Period. After that, everything seems to pale,
including the testing accountability programs, technology, building
conditions...
Good
teachers and small classes. Those were the two main factors New York's
highest court cited last year when it ruled that the state had
financially shortchanged New York City schools.
Okay,
that clears that up! Case closed.
But
one question -- if you have smaller class sizes, don't you need more
teachers? For example, if you reduce class size from 30 to 20, you need
to hire 50% more teachers. Doesn't that mean you have to scrape the
bottom of the barrel harder to find more warm bodies to stand in front
of the new smaller classes and emit education-oriented noises? So, don't
you face an inevitable trade-off between good teachers or small
classes?
This
reminds me of the time over a decade ago when Congress gave Washington
D.C. the money to hire 2,000 new police officers, and the city ended up
hiring a lot of the drug dealers the new cops were supposed to arrest.
Okay, it's not that bad, but can't anybody at the NYT do simple
arithmetic? Or did their 6th grade math classes have too many students
in them?
***
A
Modest Proposal for Andrew Sullivan: Androgel Andrew is off on
another bloviation
about:
"THE
PLIGHT OF GAY MUSLIMS: It's grim, of course. Radical Islamism hates only
Jews more than homosexuals. And the mullahs best even John Derbyshire in
their bigotry."
Well,
the subject is a little more complicated than that, since the Islamic
nations are also the world center for boy prostitution. For example, Marrakech
and Tangier in Morocco are favorite
spots for European gays to holiday because the boy-buggering is so
inexpensive.
The
great he-man film director John Huston lived in Marrakesh while making
my favorite movie "The Man Who Would Be King" in 1975. He
wrote disapprovingly in his autobiography An Open Book:
"Marrakesh
itself was an experience. The hotel was fine, the food excellent, but
the overall atmosphere was unsettling. It has since become the capital
of the haute couture, I suppose partly because little boys are
available in abundance. Depravity is looked on with an understanding
eye. It is not officially condoned, but neither is it discouraged. In
fact, there is an understanding between the boy prostitutes and the
police that, following an encounter with a foreigner, the boy is to
report it to the police along with whatever else he may have been able
to learn about his consort."
If Andrew wanted to actually do something to put
pressure on Muslims to change their unenlightened views, he could try to
persuade his fellow Western gay men to boycott Muslim countries when
planning their next sex vacations. Somehow, though, I don't think we'll
be hearing about that from Sullivan.
***
Welcome
to everybody from The Corner -- I realize my old buddy John
Derbyshire has promised you'll find "gibbering
hysteria" here about the Chalabi Charade. Sorry to disappoint.
I'm just siding with President Bush, who recently told King Abdullah of Jordan,
'You can piss on Chalabi'" (UK
Telegraph), rather than with the shrinking remnant of Chalabi
Cheerleaders left in the civilian wing of the Pentagon and the neocon
thinktanks.
But,
please stick around and check out iSteve.com. You may find it as fun to
read as Derb does.
***
Why
did the White House not tell the Pentagon about the Chalabi Raid?
One of the most puzzling questions about the raid on Chalabi's mansion
was that American armed forces were involved, yet the top civilian
leaders of the Pentagon -- presumably, the direct chain of command
-- were apparently kept in the dark about it. As I mentioned earlier, Newsweek
reported:
For
the hard-liners at the Defense Department, the raid came as a surprise.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior deputies, Paul
Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, got the news from the media. When Iraqi
police, guarded by American GIs, burst into the home and offices of
Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, looking for evidence of
kidnapping, embezzlement, torture and theft, the men who run the
Pentagon were left asking some uncomfortable questions. "Who signed
off on this raid?" wondered one very high-ranking official.
"What were U.S. soldiers doing there?" asked another,
according to a source who was present in the room... The raid was
apparently OK'd by the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer,
probably with tacit approval of White House officials." -- Newsweek
If
Bremer had an okay from the President to make this radical move, why
would Mr. Bush utterly cut Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith out of the
loop in a military operation? That sounds like a shocking
violation of the standard chain of command.
I
don't know why it happened that way (if that's the way it happened), but
the simplest explanation I can think of would be chilling: the President
of the United States did not trust his own Department of Defense to not
betray the operation to Ahmed Chalabi!
That
would be very, very bad.
***
More
press comments:
The
New York Times apologizes
to its readers for printing so many credulous articles before the war
about Saddam's WMD:
"But
we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous
as it should have been. In some cases, information that was
controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had
been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged
— or failed to emerge.The problematic articles varied in authorship
and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at
least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants,
defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people
whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent
weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad
Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since
at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a
favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker
of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last
week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these
exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced
of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now
acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile
sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this
one."
Well-connected
conservative insider Robert
Novak reports:
"Republican
senators, who do not yet want to be quoted by name, feel there must be
some accountability for this massive blunder, as there must be for the
prisoner abuse scandal. They want the president at least to consider
whether Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others should pay with their
jobs for putting Ahmed Chalabi in power."
James
P. Pinkerton, an official in the first Bush Administration, tries to channel
the ruler of Iran:
My
plan is working well. When I, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ruler of Iran,
launched my plan to get you Americans to do our work for us - to destroy
our personal enemy, Saddam Hussein, and also to destroy our historic
enemy, the country of Iraq - I could only pray that my plan would work
so quickly. Our weapon of mass destruction, of course, was Ahmad
Chalabi.
Former
Reagan staffer and Cato Institute stalwart Doug Bandow notes:
"...in
February, Mr Chalabi essentially admitted that he had misled the Bush
administration. In an interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph, he
declared: 'We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been
entirely successful.' Never mind the truth: 'What was said before is not
important.'"
In
the Guardian,
the much reviled but truth-telling former Iraq weapons inspector Scott
Ritter says:
"When
I met [Mr Chalabi] in December 1997 he said he had tremendous
connections with Iranian intelligence," Mr Ritter said, according
to an article by Mr Cockburn published today in the Guardian. "He
said that some of his best intelligence came from the Iranians and
offered to set up a meeting for me with the head of Iranian
intelligence."
One
of the countless scandal-mongering Cockburns offers a detailed
account of what appears to have been an early collaboration between
Chalabi and Iranian Intelligence to buffalo America.
The
WSJ Editorial Page, however, is sticking with their main man Chalabi, at
least for now, in "The
Chalabi Fiasco:
He's a pawn in a much larger strategic game." I'm sure that
while Chalabi appreciates the support, he feels insulted to be called a
pawn in somebody's else's game by one of the chief pawns -- the WSJ
-- in his own game.
***
The
tag team of retired four star Marine general Anthony Zinni. the
jarhead's jarhead, and Hunt for Red October author Tom Clancy are
promoting their new co-written book, which is critical of the Pentagon
civilian brain trust. According to Fox
News:
In
discussing the Iraq war, both Clancy and Zinni singled out the
Department of Defense for criticism. Clancy recalled a prewar encounter
in Washington during which he "almost came to blows" with
Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser at the time and a longtime advocate of
the invasion. "He was saying how (Secretary of State) Colin Powell
was being a wuss because he was overly concerned with the lives of the
troops," Clancy said. "And I said, 'Look ..., he's supposed to
think that way!' And Perle didn't agree with me on that. People like
that worry me." Both Clancy and Zinni praised President Bush but
would not commit to voting for him. Clancy said that voting for Sen.
John Kerry, the Democrats' presumptive nominee, would be "a stretch
for me," but wouldn't say that he was supporting Bush. Zinni, a
registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000, said he could not
support the president's re-election "if the current strategists in
the defense department are going to be carried over."
***
"Sovereignty"
for Iraq -- Either the post- June 30 Iraqi government will be truly
sovereign, in which case it will have ultimate control over the U.S.
military within its borders (which ought to be an alarming idea for
patriotic Americans), or it won't have control over the most powerful
military force inside its territority, in which case it won't be
sovereign. Here's
an interesting debate between Tony Blair and Colin Powell over exactly
what the President means by "sovereignty."
To
paraphrase Mao, sovereignty comes out of the barrel of a gun.
***
Guerilla
war in the Communication Age -- So, it appears certain that we blew
hell out of the sleeping guests at a wedding party out in the desert
near the Syrian border, killing a bunch of women and children. How do we
know? Because the (late) wedding videographer
shot hours of footage during the wedding, which matches up with the
post-kablooey footage shot by news organizations. The massacred clan
members were part-time nomads
who follow their flocks in the spring. No doubt they also smuggle stuff
back and forth across the Syrian border, and they may have been moving
foreign fighters around. But, in the war for Arab hearts and minds, that
hardly matters. What counts is that there is video footage of joyous
people celebrating a wedding one evening and then there is footage of
their mangled bodies the next day.
Just
like at Abu Ghraib, we were undermined here by the ease of visual
recording and communication in the 21st Century. Guerilla wars are
inherently ugly businesses, but it's now virtually impossible to keep
the most brutal pictures from showing up on screens around the
world.
This
has major strategic implications. The kind of voluntary guerilla wars we
could fight and win in the past -- such as in the Philippines a century
ago -- may no longer be feasible because the political cost of doing
what has to be done to civilians is too immediate. We can still win
desperate ones we have to fight, but discretionary wars for ambitious
political purposes, like Iraq, seem technologically obsolete.
***
Chalabi's
Charade in perspective: Back before the Iraq Attaq, I wrote
in VDARE:
The
triumph of capitalist democracy over communist tyranny didn't bring
"the end of
history" (as Francis Fukuyama forecast in his famous article by
that name) because the stuff of history is not so much conflict between
ideologies as between groups -- what Lenin
called with brutal brevity: "Who?
Whom?"
We
are moving from an era in which ideology mattered most to one where much
of the world's politically activity is hard to distinguish from
organized crime. Considering how many millions the ideologues of the
20th Century murdered, this transformation is a major improvement. But
it confronts us with new challenges.
Chalabi
knew all the "proposition nation" hot buttons that would
excite gullible American neocon intellectuals, but his own goal is
non-ideological. He simply wants to be a trillionaire.
Saddam
used to own all the trillions of dollars of oil under the territory of
Iraq. Chalabi's not greedy -- he just wants what Saddam once had. Sure,
Saddam ended up in a hole in the ground, but he had one helluva ride
along the way. However, more than a few other men in Iraq have the same
ambition as Chalabi, and while Chalabi is the past master at getting
America to kill for his ambitions, some of these other men are a lot
better at getting young Iraqis to die fighting for them than is Chalabi,
whose approval rating in Iraqi polls is below Saddam's.
***
By
the way ... As one reader pointed out: Doesn't "a chalabi"
sound like a sandwich? An especially delicious sandwich?
***
Ron
Unz Goes Public with His Disgust -- My pal Ron Unz, the scary-smart
hero of the campaigns against the bilingual schooling fraud, unleashes
on the foreign policy neocons in "If
You Can’t Trust Chalabi-the-Thief, Whom Can You Trust?"
***
Nervous
days at the AEI -- A friend who worked at the American Enterprise
Institute when it was the bland but infinitely respectable think tank
for Chamber of Commerce America, back before it's still puzzling
mutation into the Middle Eastern Adventure Institute, dropped by to see some old friends there on Friday, the day
after Ahmed Chalabi's files were seized. He said the paranoia level was
intense. Apparently, they were expecting a visit from federal
investigators.
***
Tons
of stuff on Chalabi's Cheatin' Heart below, but first ...
New
VDARE column at left
on India v. China
By
the way, Razib of GNXP.com and I have
kicked around the idea that Indian thought tends to be at one end and
Chinese thought at the other end of a dimension running from
metaphysical to practical, with European thought in the optimal middle
-- where the focus is on finding "practical principles."
Historian
S.A.M. Adshead of New Zealand wrote a little book called something like
China in World History, full of aphorisms. One that particularly struck
me went something like this: the Chinese focused on magic and technology
while the Europeans focused on theology and science. (You could extend
that to India and say that the Indians focused on philosophy and
mathematics.) Early on, the Chinese profited more, but in the long run,
the Western approach proved best.
For
example, consider medicine. The scattershot Chinese trial and approach
method accumulated countless medicinal herbs, some of which really do
work, but nobody has any idea why, so there's never any rising curve of
medical advance. Indian homeopathic medicine, in contrast, is based
around the use of uselessly small amounts of chemicals, which is
justified by an a priori philosophy. In the middle lies Western
medicine, which is based on trial and error that's eventually boiled
down to a smaller number of powerful principles. Yet, keep in mind that
Western doctors may well have killed more people than they cured until,
maybe, the early 20th Century!
***
Republicans
were outraged when Nancy Pelosi said of the President: "The
emperor has no clothes." The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace, has the real
story.
***
Will
any civilian Chalabi Cheerleaders in the Pentagon be declared
"enemy combatants" and sent to Guantanamo Bay for a little
"softening up?" Time
reports:
After
a CIA complaint, the FBI launched a full field criminal probe into
whether Chalabi and senior i.n.c. [Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress]
aides passed high-level intelligence to Iran—information believed to
be so sensitive, a senior U.S. official says, that it may have provided
Iranian authorities with insights into the U.S.'s sources and methods
for collecting intelligence and could even "lead to the loss of
lives." U.S. intelligence officials told the FBI that they have
"hard" evidence that Chalabi met with a senior officer of
Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Iraq. A senior U.S.
official says Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, are
suspected of giving Iran "highly classified" data that were
"known to only a few within the U.S. government." The FBI
investigation, sources say, will probably involve dozens of agents and a
full arsenal of investigative techniques, possibly including
court-authorized searches and wiretaps. The probe will examine
whether U.S. officials illegally transmitted state secrets to the i.n.c.
The investigation could ultimately reach high-ranking civilian officials
at the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency (dia) who have
dealings with Chalabi and his organization.
***
In
case you were wondering, here's a potentially relevant excerpt from
Article III of the U.S. Constitution:
Section.
3. Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in
levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them
Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the
Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in
open Court.
Clause
2: The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason,
but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or
Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
Should
giving American secrets to Chalabi's spymaster, long suspected to be an
Iranian agent by U.S. government agencies, be prosecuted as treason? (Aras
Habib Karem, or whatever he calls himself, as apparently skedaddled to
safety in Iran, according to Time, like Kim Philby hightailed it
to Moscow.)
Treason
sounds like a
really big stretch to me. Just because David Frum got Bush to declare
Iran part of the Axis of Evil, does that mean Iran is legally an
"Enemy?" I dunno. But every week on Law & Order,
the prosecutors make even bigger stretches to nail some Great White
Defendant (to use Tom Wolfe's phrase from "Bonfire of the
Vanities") by torturing the law until it squeaks. And that
show is sure popular.
Here's
an article
from NRO arguing for an expansive legal definition of treason ...
in the case of that "American Taliban" kid. And here's a more
thorough debate
over whether Walker was guilty of treason in Insight Magazine.
***
Whose
side are you on: Ahmed Chalabi's or the President's?
"To
King Abdullah of Jordan, Mr Bush remarked: 'You can piss on
Chalabi.'" -- UK
Telegraph
"For
the hard-liners at the Defense Department, the raid came as a surprise.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his senior deputies, Paul
Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, got the news from the media. When Iraqi
police, guarded by American GIs, burst into the home and offices of
Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, looking for evidence of
kidnapping, embezzlement, torture and theft, the men who run the
Pentagon were left asking some uncomfortable questions. "Who signed
off on this raid?" wondered one very high-ranking official.
"What were U.S. soldiers doing there?" asked another,
according to a source who was present in the room... The raid was
apparently OK'd by the American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer,
probably with tacit approval of White House officials." -- Newsweek
As
you may have noticed, I'm not the biggest fan of Mr. Bush's leadership.
But, he's finally waking up to how he got snookered. And I sure as hell
trust my President in this dispute more than I trust the convicted Iraqi
conman who is known throughout the bazaars of the Fertile Crescent as
"Ahmed-the-Thief." I am astonished at the number of neocons
who have, in the crisis, decided to turn against their President and
side with Ahmed Chalabi.
***
A
reader writes:
Having
worked on the 92 Bush-Quayle ..., I was really surprised at the degree
to which George W. Bush favored neoconservatives. That crowd
really treated his father badly, much worse than Buchanan in the
primaries or various liberal Republicans like the late John Chafee
or Bill Weld. Campaign people and the Bush "schedule C"
appointees viewed the neocons as a selfish and untrustworthy crowd...and
definitely "not like us." Many of them quickly put
feelers out to Clinton when things looked rough in 92. Since Bush is
famous for holding grudges, it seemed strange that he turned to people
who treated his father like a chump.
I
strongly suspect that necons will try to shift blame as the Iraq debacle
worsens. Rumsfeld will be left carrying a lot of the blame, and
maybe Bush will become a target as well. It will be interesting to
see how things develop.
***
Lots
on the "States
with higher IQ vote Democrat" hoax
here.
***
Special
Sneak Preview This Weekend of
This
Summer's Most Unbelievable True* Story!
George
W. Bush
is
The
Manchumpian
Candidate
Recoil
in shock (but not awe) as the War on Terror mutates horribly into the
War in Error!
*
Warning: Truth not yet proven
***
Early
Sunday update on...
Did
Iranian Mullahs Hoax Bush into Invading Iraq for Them?
"Suspcion
of Chalabi Deception Intensifies" reports the LA Times on
Sunday, 5/23:
WASHINGTON
-- Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime White House favorite who has been
implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to
at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort
to dupe them about Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs, current
and former U.S. intelligence officials said. U.S. investigators now
are seeking to determine whether the effort -- which one U.S. official
likened to trying to "game the system" -- was secretly
supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush
administration to oust the Baghdad regime, Tehran's longtime enemy.
Officials
said other evidence indicates that Chalabi's longtime intelligence chief
furnished Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security highly classified
information on U.S. troop movements, top-secret communications and other
closely guarded material on U.S. operations in Iraq.
The
U.S. investigation into the suspected spy operation was a key reason
behind the raid Thursday on Chalabi's Baghdad home and the offices of
his Iraqi National Congress. Several INC members also were accused of
kidnapping, robbery and corruption....
It
is not clear whether Iran had any role in using the INC to provide
disinformation to the West. U.S. officials say the INC may have been
acting on its own when it sent a steady out a stream of defectors
between 1998 and 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's
purported weapons of mass destruction...
Because
even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their
informants, or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has
become clear only in recent months that Chalabi's group sent defectors
with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy,
France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the United States, the
officials said.
As
a result the officials said, U.S. intelligence analysts in some cases
used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence
sources" to corroborate assessments of Hussein's suspected weapons
programs. Few of the CIA's prewar judgments have been proved
accurate so far. "We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming
from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence
official. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned
out."
A
U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had
provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies.
"It's safe to say he tried to game the system," the official
said.
A
discredited INC defector to Germany who was code-named
"Curveball" was the chief source of information on Iraq's
supposed fleet of mobile germ weapons factories. Another INC defector
who provided similar information was deemed a liar. So was an INC
defector who said he had helped build 20 underground germ weapons
laboratories, a now-discredited claim that made headlines when the INC
made him available to some reporters in December 2001.
The
CIA was unable to interview two other supposedly senior Iraqis who spied
for British intelligence in Baghdad before the war and claimed to
provide detailed information from within Hussein's inner circle.
Information
from both informants has now "fallen apart," one U.S. official
said. "Neither had direct knowledge of what they claimed. They were
describing what they had heard."
The
details further tarnish Chalabi's battered image amid allegations that
he shared highly classified information on U.S. operations in Iraq with
his intelligence chief, identified as Aras Karim Habib.
The
INC, which began as an umbrella group for Iraqi exiles, has long had an
office in Tehran. Chalabi has repeatedly visited the Iranian capital,
and some critics in Congress have questioned his growing ties to the
ruling Shiite Muslim regime there.
A
U.S. official said Chalabi "shared [information] with people who
provided it" to Tehran. "There's real concern he was passing
very sensitive, highly classified information to the Iranians," the
official said.
Habib,
who was named in an arrest warrant issued during the raid Thursday, is a
fugitive. Chalabi was scheduled to appear today on several American TV
talk shows.
Should
make for interesting television.
Please
note what this article is saying and what it is speculating about. We
know that Chalabi snookered the U.S.A. into the war with his made-up WMD
intel, and this article helps explains how he cleverly got so many
different countries to believe it. We're pretty sure by now that he has
been giving American secrets to Iran's secret police during the
Occupation. This article goes on to speculate that before the
war, the Iranians were giving Chalabi help in hoodwinking the rest of
the world, thus creating the Manchurian Candidate nightmare scenarios
where one of America's worst enemies swindles us into our executing its
evil plans for them at the cost of hundreds of American lives and
hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
That's
still speculation. But it sure makes a lot of sense. We know Chalabi's
spymaster Aras Karim Habib had long ties to Tehran. And the superb
competence of Chalabi's disinformation campaign suggests his
organization had professional help from a sizable country's spy service,
such as Iran's.
One
excuse we'll probably hear soon is that Bonnie Prince Chalabi must be an
innocent who was betrayed by his underling Aras Karib Habib, but that
seems unlikely when you consider just how smart is Chalabi is. He has a
Ph.D. in mathematics from the U. of Chicago, but he's no nerd -- he has
the people skills of Oprah. This convicted embezzler is a James Bond
evil millionaire villain come to life. Newsweek's new article
calls him "a Machiavellian con man for the ages."
Let's
face it: while Chalabi's cheerleaders considered themselves to be
geniuses and men of the world, they weren't anywhere near his league. He
figured out all their weaknesses -- whether stupidity, cupidity, naiveté,
dual loyalty, whatever they were -- and played them like a Stradivarius
in the hands of Paganini.
***
"The
Rise and Fall of Chalabi: Bush's Mr. Wrong" -- Newsweek's
brand new expose on Chalabi:
Chalabi
has not always charmed his patrons. His first run as a CIA asset in the
early- and mid-' 90s was a disaster. Chalabi's attempts to foment an
insurrection were aborted in a fiasco still known around the agency as
the "Bay of Goats." "It was a nightmare," says a
former U.S. intelligence official who worked with Chalabi. "His
primary focus was to drag us into a war that [President] Clinton didn't
want to fight."...
Chalabi
had more luck with a group of Republican hard-liners who formed a kind
of government-in-exile in the 1990s. So-called neoconservatives like
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the veteran bureaucratic infighter known in
the Reagan administration as the "Prince of Darkness," were
drawn to Chalabi's ideas. Several, like Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, a then
obscure Washington lawyer who had once worked for Perle at the Pentagon—and
now serves—as under secretary of Defense for policy—began talking
about a speech Chalabi gave to the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs in June 1997. In that speech,Chalabi promised that
Saddam could be overthrown on the cheap if the United States dared back
a guerrilla force led by Chalabi. (Feith told NEWSWEEK that he found
Chalabi's vision of post-Saddam Iraq to be "quite moving.") A
side benefit, Chalabi suggested in his conversations with the neocons,
would be an Arab country friendly to Israel. Soon Chalabi was dining
from time to time with Perle, a fellow epicure...
A
few American spooks even speculate that Habib has been working for
Tehran all along—to the point of spreading disinformation about
Saddam's WMD stockpiles to help lure the Americans into toppling Saddam,
Iran's bitter enemy in a long and losing war during the 1980s. The
theory seems very far-fetched—why would Tehran want America to occupy
its neighbor Iraq? But in the back-stabbing, "Spy vs. Spy"
world of Baghdad, all conspiracy theories have their day...
A
certain amount of corruption is to be expected when new governments
arise out of old dictatorships. But, according to Iraqi investigators
who raided Chalabi's house and headquarters last week, Chalabi's empire
pushed the boundaries of brazenness. Today his extensive network of
cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank.
That
reminds me of my one highly indirect encounter with Chalabi. Ann Marlowe
asked Chalabi about my theory (in my award-winning American
Conservative article "Cousin
Marriage Conundurm") that Iraq is so rife with nepotism due to
inbred extended familes that honest government is unlikely there. He
pooh-poohed my idea. I would say that I had the last laugh,
except that the Chalabi family appears to be crying all the way to the
bank.
***
Saturday
Update:
Laura Rozen asks: "Was the real back story to Gulf War
II not that a group of neoconservatives tried to realize their grand
strategy for the Middle East, but that a bunch of academics playing spy
games got duped by Iranian intelligence?" You should check her War
and Piece blog for updates on this developing story. As she noted
earlier, "A word of warning, that this Chalabi story is
being sourced from so many directions, with so much speculation and even
false flags, that the basic story line is bound to drastically evolve.
Some walking back on various aspects of the plot, am hearing now. Will
try to straighten out any misconceptions I have posted as I can..."
Joshua Micha Marshall is staying abreast at Talking
Points Memo and Randall Parker is all over it at ParaPundit.
*
 Friday,
May 21: Did
the United States of America get conned into conquering Iraq by the
Ayatollah Khomeini's heirs in Tehran? Were the Bush Administration's
neocon strategists duped by a node on David Frum's "Axis
of Evil" into carrying out their nefarious agenda for them?
Boy, if this Newsday story
is true, it will sure be a tough one for Rove to spin! If Bush did
indeed fall for the Ayatollah's Posthumous Revenge on the Great Satan,
Bush might not carry Texas. He might lose 538-0 in the Electoral
College.
Agency:
Chalabi group was front for Iran
BY
KNUT ROYCE, WASHINGTON BUREAU
Newsday
[Or
you can find the article on the Seattle
Times]
May
21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT
WASHINGTON
-- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm
of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by
Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to
collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence
sources.
"Iranian
intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by
furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to
provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,"
said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense
Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of
thousands of internal documents.
The
Information Collection Program also "kept the Iranians informed
about what we were doing" by passing classified U.S. documents and
other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions
of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An
administration official confirmed that "highly classified
information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that
channel."
The
Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to
Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's
civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed
on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick
Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch,
said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's
U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass
destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence
operation. "They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up
to," he said.
He
described it as "one of the most sophisticated and successful
intelligence operations in history."
"I'm
a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work," he said.
An
intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his
agency's internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But
he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. "Some
of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting
high value targets and on force protection issues," he said.
"And some of the information wasn't so great."
At
the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to
administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib,
a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during
a raid on Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded
arrest. Karim, who sometimes goes by
the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection
program.
The
intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's
conclusions said that Karim's "fingerprints are all over it."
"There
was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian
Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government,
inadvertently," he said.
The
Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. funds
over the past four years, including $33 million from the State
Department and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In
Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of the fourth floor
of a secure intelligence headquarters building, while the intelligence
agency was on the floor above, according to an Iraqi source who knows
Karim well.
The
links between the INC and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992,
when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military
operations.
Indications
that Iran, which fought a bloody war against Iraq during the 1980s, was
trying to lure the U.S. into action against Saddam Hussein appeared many
years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that ousting
Hussein was a national priority.
In
1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear
program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program
in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclear inspectors
what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who
fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape.
The
documents, which referred to results of experiments on enriched uranium
in the bomb's core, were almost flawless, according to Andrew Cockburn's
recent account of the event in the political newsletter CounterPunch.
But
the inspectors were troubled by one minor matter: Some of the techinical
descriptions used terms that would only be used by an Iranian. They
determined that the original copy had been written in Farsi by an
Iranian scientist and then translated into Arabic.
And
the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded the documents were
fraudulent.
(And,
here's
more on how Chalabi's intelligence chief, long suspected of being an
Irainian agent, has fled to avoid being arrested.)
See,
we've known for a long time that Bonnie Prince Chalabi, the king over
the water to his neocon admirers, hoaxed us into invading Iraq in two
ways: by lying about the WMD and by lying about the public mood inside
Iraq. And we've learned recently that he was passing new American
secrets to Tehran. What we hadn't known until this article, assuming
it's true, is that Chalabi had -- long before the war -- been passing
disinformation from Tehran to us. That's how he could make his reports
on Saddam's non-existent nuke building so realistic -- they were based
on the Iranians' very much existent nuke development.
In
other words, we weren't just fooled into getting into this infernal war
by a homesick exile, but by our sworn enemies in Iran.
That's
bad, very, very bad.
America
will be the laughingstock of the world. I can't think of too many
things more humiliating than this in history. The closest analogy might
be in 1870 when France's Emperor Napoleon III fell for Bismarck's
hostile editing of the Kaiser's conciliatory telegram and declared war
on Prussia, falling into the Iron Chancellor's trap. Nap III got beat,
captured, and lost his throne.
But
at least he was hoaxed by a master. Our neocon geniuses got pranked by these
people.
***
How
do we find out if this is true? The simplest way would be to arrest
Chalabi and turn him over to the Delta
Force boys out at the airport and have them put him to the question,
like they say in Edgar Allan Poe stories about the Spanish Inquisition. They're not creepy amateurs
like the reservists at Abu Ghraib. They're professionals. "Mr.
Chalabi, vee haf vays of making you talk."
Another
interesting topic is what kind of life insurance does Chalabi have. If I
were him, I'd have an arrangement with my Swiss bank that the day
after my untimely death, they would turn the files in my safety deposit
box documenting all my links to American neocons over to Le Monde and
Der Spiegel. Of course, Chalabi has lots of other
potential enemies, but then he has lots of other files too -- he seized
Saddam's secret police torture confession files as soon as he got to
Iraq. So, his life expectancy might be surprisingly long.
***
If
this is true, what next? I guess they'll try to spin it: "Just
because our hated enemies in Iran manipulated us into going to war
doesn't mean we wouldn't have done it all on our own anyway!"
Hmmhmm... Needs work. If I were Karl Rove, I'd have focus groups of
likely voters scheduled for noon Saturday and have my staff stay up all
night writing possible excuses to try out on them.
A
reader writes:
I
have a good excuse ready for Rove & Co.
“Hellllllo!
Iran is part of the axis of evil. They’re EVIL. So this is just the
kind of trickery we’ve been expecting from them.”
First
question: If the spin doesn't work, legally speaking, how does the
Republican Party dump Bush? The primaries are all over and he won almost
all the delegates. Can the delegates legally rebel at the GOP Convention
or are they bound by law to vote for the Chump-in-Chief?
Second
question: Who should replace Bush on the GOP ticket? The Cabinet is
discredited, even Powell. For instant name recognition, the obvious
choice would be Ah-nold, but he ain't eligible.
***
Who's
still in Chalabi's pocket?
At
National Review, Michael
Ledeen, Michael
Rubin, and Frank
Gaffney all sided with Chalabi against the Bush Administration on
Friday morning. David
Frum delivered a spinjob trying to put his long relationship with
Chalabi in the best possible light. Meanwhile, Jonah
Goldberg did his best impression of Sgt. Schulz on "Hogan's
Heroes" -- "I know nuthink!" Jonah announces, "I've
never been able to figure out what the story is on him." Editor Rich
Lowry goes one step farther toward sanity: "I’m with Jonah in
not really knowing what to make of all the Chalabi business, but I’ve
always been a mild Chalabi skeptic."
Rich:
NR is in danger of being permanently tainted by the | 
Me
