As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend: how Iran used the US to topple Saddam Hussein, at the US’s expense — in money and reputation.
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran:
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.
This was the result of the Office of the VP bypassing the CIA to get the intelligence it wanted, rather than what was true. For this, we paid the Iraqi National Congress $340,000/month (at approximately $4 million a year, the total tab is in the millions if it was “over several years”). Add to the balance sheet with billions spent on the war, the 800+ American lives, thousands of Iraq lives, the ruins of Iraq and America’s reputation.
<update> 12 years of payments amounts to $48.96 million.
I’m having a hard time squaring what I see now with this:
No one *but* an ideologue could have gotten us into this mess.