Turenne
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/19088/
The ironies are flowing thicker than crude oil in Iraq
these days.
First, the United States surreptitiously turns over nominal
control of the country to a government appointed by
outsiders - while leaving real power in the hands of U.S.
military commanders - and calls it an exercise in
democracy.
And although the interim prime minister is a former member
of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, who later conducted
anti-Hussein terrorist operations on behalf of the CIA -
operations in which innocent Iraqi civilians may have been
killed - his anointment as leader of a "free Iraq" is being
hailed by President Bush as a great victory in the war on
terror.
According to several former intelligence officials
interviewed by the New York Times this month, the political
group run by interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi in the
1990s, but financed by the CIA, "used car bombs and other
explosive devices smuggled into Iraq" in an attempt to
sabotage and destabilize Hussein's regime.
With such a record, it is perhaps not strange then that
Allawi, who built his exile organization with defecting
Iraqi military officers, is already proclaiming the need to
delay elections scheduled for January and impose martial
law. On Monday, Bush said coalition forces would support
such a call for martial law, presumably enforced by U.S.
troops.
Allawi is also demanding that Hussein be put under his
government's control and tried quickly by an Iraqi court -
probably a strategic move to seize Hussein's strongman
crown directly.
When Allawi was first picked for the prime minister post
through an opaque selection process ostensibly run by a
U.N. representative, former CIA Iran-Iraq analyst Kenneth
Pollack justified the agency's earlier use of Allawi as a
terrorist with the comment "send a thief to catch a thief.'
But the question now is: Do you send a thief to build a
democracy?
There has been little media follow-up to reports in early
June that Allawi's work for the CIA amounted to much more
than trying to win hearts and minds. Yet, what we do know
is damning enough. In 1996, one of Allawi's top officers
and his group's self-proclaimed chief bomb maker detailed
the mechanics behind Allawi's murderous actions in a
videotape subsequently obtained by a British newspaper, the
Independent. On the tape, he even expresses annoyance that
the CIA had shortchanged him on one job, a car bombing,
allegedly paying only half the agreed-upon amount.
Typical US policy.Get rid of one maniac and then put in a
car-bombing CIA agent.Let Democracy Reign indeed...