Piss-You-Off Summer Reading

By C.J. JANOVY

At the downtown library, I recently checked out Aram Roston’s new The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi. I had hoped to learn more about Chalabi’s relationship with Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback.

Chalabi is the Iraqi exile and charming con man who fabricated the Iraqi National Congress – an impressive-sounding organization supposedly made up of leaders-in-waiting of a new, free Iraq once the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein. As Roston shows, though, the INC was really just a handful of Chalabi’s sometimes drunken sycophants. Still, Chalabi was able to convince key Washington insiders – mainly Neocons with big names such as Richard Perle – that we must remove Hussein. These folks pushed Chalabi’s fairy tales long after the CIA quit buying anything he had to say (and I mean literally “buying”: U.S. taxpayers funded Chalabi’s escapades in the Middle East and in London for years).

As Roston puts it, Chalabi didn’t have his own army to depose Saddam, so he talked us into using ours. Much of this talk consisted of long-since disproven “facts” about WMD programs, mobile chemical weapons labs and lots of other propaganda that many of us average citizens knew was bullshit way before the war ever started.