Our Newest Proconsul

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Our Newest Proconsul
Robert Dreyfuss
June 09, 2005


Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, will be published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in the fall.

It's a foregone conclusion that the Senate will confirm Zalmay Khalilzad to be the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, replacing John Negroponte. Still, it's worth stepping back to consider what Khalilzad's appointment says about the Bush administration's continuing refusal to comprehend the magnitude of the disaster in Iraq—and about the Democrats' inexplicable inability to step forward and challenge the president as Iraq continues to deteriorate. His confirmation hearing Tuesday slipped by almost unnoticed, thanks in part to a docile stable of Democrats who decided to give him a free pass, rather than seize the opportunity to lambaste the president's Iraq policy.

First, on the man himself: it's hard to imagine anyone worse than Khalilzad for the Baghdad job. Like one of Alexander the Great's proconsuls, Khalilzad neatly steps into one U.S.-occupied neocolony, Iraq, from another, Afghanistan. Khalilzad, born in Afghanistan, has been deeply involved in U.S.-Afghan policy for more than two decades. He is arguably as much to blame as anyone for the catastrophic mistakes that led first to that country's civil war, then to the rise of the Taliban, and finally to the Afghanistan of 2005: a warlord-dominated narco-state, in which heroin and opium provide fully half of the gross domestic product, and in which a thriving, Taliban-led Islamic fundamentalist insurgency is recently showing signs of emerging, once again, as a mortal threat to a tottering regime in Kabul. Zalmay Khalilzad, it seems, is getting out just in time.

In Baghdad, Khalilzad will be forced to deal with an Iranian-backed coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties that is that country's main power. Yet Khalilzad will be right at home. For two decades, Khalilzad has consistently argued that the United States ought to support Iran's ayatollahs, Afghanistan's mujahideen and the Taliban.

In the 1980s, Khalilzad served as a senior State Department official in charge of the Afghan war, and he worked closely with Thomas Goutierre of the University of Nebraska, whose center received CIA, Pentagon and Unocal funding in the 1980s and '90s, in support of the Islamist guerrillas. That, of course, was the U.S.-backed jihad that catapulted Osama bin Laden to prominence and that created a worldwide network of militant Islamist guerrillas schooled in terrorism, including assassinations and car bombings.




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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050609/our_newest_proconsul.php

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1. Former Unocal Official Zalmay Khalizad vows to crush Iraqi resistance

Wednesday 22nd June 2005 (00h03) :
Former Unocal Official Zalmay Khalizad vows to crush Iraqi resistance
3 comment(s).
New US ambassador vows to crush Iraq’s insurgency
by Beth Potter- Baghdad

The new US ambassador to Iraq said Tuesday he would work with the population to crush the insurgency that is throttling much of the country despite massive operations against the rebels.

"I will work with Iraqis to break the back of the insurgency," said Zalmay Khalilzad, who presented his credentials to President Jalal Talabani on the way to Brussels for an international conference on rebuilding Iraq.

"Foreign terrorists and hardline Baathists want Iraq to be in a civil war," Khalilzad told reporters, referring to members of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

"Foreign terrorists are using Iraqis as cannon fodder."



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http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6569