QUAGMIRE  (CONT)

The hawks thus saw westernized Chalabi, who had not been in Baghdad since he was a teenager, as the man of destiny whom U.S. military forces had merely to install in the capital. The professionals, who had worked with him in the early 1990s, on the other hand, saw him as a confidence man.

"What he did was pander to the dreams of a group of powerful men, centered in the Pentagon, the Defense Policy Board, the vice president's office, and various think tanks scattered around Washington," according to Thomas Engelhardt, a New York writer who produces a daily web log on the war.

"The thing that needs to be grasped here is that since 1991 these men have been dreaming up a storm about reconfiguring the Middle East, while scaling the heavens (via various Star Wars programs for the militarization of space), and so nailing down an American earth for eternity. Their dreams were utopian and so, by definition, unrealizable. Theirs were lava dreams, and they were dreamt, like all such burning dreams, without much reference to the world out there. They were perfect pickings for a Chalabi."
Of course, the fact that Chalabi is now scarcely mentioned as a possible political force in Iraq is barely acknowledged by the hawks who still insist, albeit with less conviction, that things are going their way and that there is no reason to panic.

Published on Friday, July 11, 2003 by Inter Press Service

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