WHOSE SIDE IS AMERICA ON? (Richard Reeves )

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Op/Ed - Richard Reeves


WHOSE SIDE IS AMERICA ON?

Fri Jun 4, 8:03 PM ET Add Op/Ed - Richard Reeves to My Yahoo!

By Richard Reeves


PARIS -- Once upon a time, a Ph.D. candidate in California named Ibrahim al-Marashi picked up the morning newspapers and found his 15 minutes of fame. Secretary of State Colin Powell was before the United Nations testifying that all good men must go to war because the aces of American and British intelligence had uncovered undeniable proof that the dictator of Iraq was making, hiding and getting ready to use weapons of mass destruction.



It turned out that a lot of the intelligence Powell cited that day came from al-Marashi's doctoral dissertation on the military ambitions of Saddam Hussein, published two years earlier under the title "Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network." It was plagiarism at the highest levels. British intelligence had stolen 5,000 words from the American student, son of Iraqi parents, ignored his conclusions, and declared Saddam an imminent threat to English-speaking Christians everywhere.


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Reading al-Mashari gets more depressing than that. After earning degrees at Georgetown University and UCLA, he is now a fellow of the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and has also written other political analysis that Western intelligence agencies should have found more significant than WMD theories. In his Zaman piece, he suggests, for instance, that the coalition's hopes for winning the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq, including those who had the most personal reasons to hate Saddam, may have been doomed from the start -- because so many Iraqis believed that the dictator had been for a very long time an agent or tool of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.


After all, he reports, Iraqis know that the United States supplied Saddam with military and intelligence help during the country's long war against Iran in the 1980s. Then, after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) presided over by President George H.W. Bush, American-led coalition troops did not kill or capture Saddam, but urged Kurds in the north and Shiites in the South to rise up against him. When they did, the United States stood aside and allowed Saddam to slaughter the resisters. Americans have their own explanations for that, but al-Marashi says many Iraqis believe it was all an American plot to strengthen, not weaken, Saddam.


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"The more unstable Iraq is, the more the United States can justify having military bases to 'stabilize' the country ... even though the postwar chaos in Iraq may have given al-Qaida agents a new base to continue their campaign against the United States."



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[teryang]

1. Reeves is brilliant

Thanks for posting this.