Cheney, the Shiites, etc.

February 14, 2005

The Post reports this morning that Vice President Cheney’s daughter—no, not the gay one—is back from having a baby and is also back at the State Department. During the run up to the Iraq war, Liz Cheney was a senior official at State’s Near East affairs bureau, where she intimidated diplomats and policymakers at the anti-Cheney bureau, who knew she would tell daddy if they misbehaved—that is, if they criticized daddy’s war plans. Now she is back: this time as principal deputy assistant secretary.

Cheney must be happy with the results in Iraq—though not completely, since the precious Shiite fundamentalists favored by the neoconservatives only got 48 percent of the vote.

The results, of course, show the utter futility of the elections in Iraq. In Anbar Province, turnout was 2 percent, and similar miniscule showing among Sunnis proliferated in other provinces, too. By no stretch of the imagination can the Iraqi parliament be considered legitimate. That won’t stop the American-installed regime from naming a Kurd as Iraq’s president: Jalal Talabani, the wily, Iran-connected veteran of decades of intrigue who will become the first non-Arab president of an Arab country. 

Writing in the Post, poor Robin Wright gets it totally wrong. She argues—in an article headlined: “Iraq Winners Allied with Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision”—that it went all wrong. Pro-Iran candidates such as Talabani and the Shiite list under (Iranian-born) Ayatollah Sistani’s pals and such militant Islamists as Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), she says, give Iran a strong hand in Iraq and foil U.S. plans. Maybe that’s true, if by “U.S. plans” she means the plans of the realists, the CIA and the State Department. But the neocons are ecstatic: not only does the new Iraq threaten Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, but it will be people by Kurds (many of whom have secret ties to Israel’s Mossad), Ahmed Chalabi (an Israeli-connected Shiite), and other doubtful Iraq’s of Iranian provenance.

At the Hudson Institute on Friday, I listened to a representative from Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress blister Jordan and Syria for supporting the Iraqi resistance. He said not a word about Iran, one of the original members of the “axis of evil.” Sitting next to him, nodding was Richard Perle, the dark prince of neoconservativism. The INC rep actually accused the State Department and the U.S. embassy of collaborating with terrorists and Baathists—and Perle endorsed the view with a tut-tut comment about how he is no longer surprised at anything the State Department does.

Chalabi may or may not get the prime minister’s job, but the Times on Sunday used its front page for a piece promoting Chalabi’s candidacy. The nugget of the piece is that Chalabi hopes to emerge as a compromise, Sistani-backed candidate—and that his main support is coming from none other than Iran-linked, terrorist-minded Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite fanatic. The one who kills Americans.

Over and over I’ve said in this space that the real mystery of the Iran-Iraq complex is the tangled relationship between the neoconservatives, Israel, Iraq’s Shiite right and some  Iranian factions. The INC has told me that, in Iran, they have always been working with the Iranian hardliners, not the reformers. Now, Iran’s Badr Brigade and the Kurds’ pesh merga paramilitary thugs will rule Iraq.  It might not happen—it is like herding cats, only worse—but it’s clear that Perle and Co. would love to see an axis linking Israel, Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds, and Iran.

For the latest important neocon musings on Iran, meanwhile, see Michael Rubin’s “Will Washington Support Democracy in Iran,” published here as a “Jerusalem issue brief.” Rubin is an American Enterprise Institute neocon who worked in the Pentagon during and after the Iraq war. He notes with happiness that Meghan O’Sullivan has been moved out of the NSC, where he handled Iran. Rubin tars O’Sullivan with the crime of being a realist and says her ouster “bodes well for a more activist policy” toward Iran.