Saddam Hussein was a Friend to the West

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to Ekurd.net

But the West’s worst lies are still being touted twenty years on

Career spy with the CIA, and long-practising lawyer, Jack O’Connell (1921-2010), revealed key facts about the deliberate miscasting of Saddam Hussein in his posthumous book, King’s Counsel – A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East [1].

My methodology in reviewing this information has been to set forth O’Connell’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s overtures to the West and build in corroboration in greater detail over each key issue.

O’Connell established Saddam Hussein’s enthusiasm for the restoration of Iraq-US relations under President Reagan and his many subsequent efforts to foster peace.

Jack O’Connell tells how back in 1983 he met up with Richard (Dick) Murphy and they discussed US and Iraqi wishes to restore relations at the time but how the two countries were not talking directly. He noted that Saddam, being a proud man, US president Reagan would have to write a personal letter asking for relations to be restored and this should be delivered by a US official of stature. [2] The president’s special envoy to the ME at this time was Donald Rumsfeld and he was to be visiting the region in November, but his itinerary had not included Iraq.

An Arab-American businessman working with Iraq and Syria (Jack O’Connell never names him) said he knew the leaders of both countries well, had historically tipped off an aide to Saddam Hussein when he was living in sanctuary in Egypt before he rose to power. He had been among the Ba’ath revolutionaries who escaped there in 1959 following their first failed attempt to assassinate General Abd al-Karim Kasim. The businessman told the twenty-year old Saddam there was a plan afoot to assassinate him on a proposed trip to Syria. In 1963, when the Ba’ath Party was first ousted and the ringleaders fled, one of them had given this man the party’s official files to look after securely until such time as they could return. Years later, when he was in power, Saddam remembered these good deeds.

The Aqaba Pipeline Plan

The businessman thought Rumsfeld would be the ideal middleman to help renew relations between the US and Iraq and he said he but would ask the Iraqi Ambassador in France about it. This duly ensued and the Iraqi Ambassador in Paris called Tariq Aziz in Baghdad. Aziz was scheduled to be on a visit to China but said he could return a day earlier if Rumsfeld were to arrive and be carrying such a letter. A dinner would be hosted for him that evening and he would be taken to see Saddam the next morning. O’Connell wrote how the US President Reagan signed the letter, Rumsfeld added Baghdad to his itinerary and Tariq Aziz did as he had promised. The following day on December 20, 1983, Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein who all but agreed to restore relations. (Notes of the meeting were finally declassified by the State Dept. a decade later in 1994.) Saddam Hussein had been saying that it was unnatural not to be able to conduct relations at a full diplomatic level. (p/157-159). Rumsfeld’s statement included the written mention that “having a whole generation of Iraqis and Americans grow up without understanding each other had negative implications and could lead to mix-ups.” [3] After terms were negotiated US relations with Iraq were formally restored in November 1984.

Rumsfeld, who had presidential ambitions of his own included among his ambitions the project that Saddam Hussein build an oil pipeline between southern Iraq and the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan with a spur added to the port of Haifa in Israel. He went to Baghdad on behalf of George Shultz, secretary of state for Ronald Reagan and president of Bechtel between 1975-19824. The Bechtel Corporation was proposing to build the pipeline, but Rumsfeld was unsure whether the Israelis would go for it. Key figures in the American- Jewish community were lobbying very hard in Washington for it at the time. O’Connell mentioned that there was a saying going round that “Baghdad was on the road to Jerusalem” and peace was in the air.

A New York Times article published on June 5, 1984, midway into the Iran-Iraq war, opined,

“Construction of the pipeline would greatly aid Iraq, which is locked in an escalating war with Iran. Since the war began in 1980, Iraq’s oil exports have been reduced about 75 percent…Al Donner, a spokesman for Bechtel…expected to have a contract ready for signing by the end of the month…” [5]

Of interest, at the time of the invasion of 2003 a flurry of reports over the behind-the scenes-negotiations between Bechtel and Iraq showed links to many of the same players about to profit from the war: “The intense focus of Rumsfeld, Schultz (a former president of Bechtel), Cheney and other Reagan officials, in concert with Bechtel, on the pipeline, reads like an abbreviated, or mini “Pentagon Papers,” laying the groundwork for a collapse in relations between the U.S. and Iraq, and eventually to war. The documents also cast Bechtel’s current position as one of two top candidates for the lucrative contract to “rebuild Iraq” in a troubling light…” [6]

King Hussein was keen on the pipeline being built to Aqaba and believed Saddam Hussein to be a trustworthy ally, but he very much opposed any spur being built on to Haifa from the port in Jordan. The king needed Iraq’s oil and he and Saddam Hussein had always helped each other.

Richard (Dick) N. Viets, former US Ambassador to Jordan (1981-1984) [7] told Rumsfeld that neither he nor King Hussein could support the idea and Rumsfeld’s well known bad temper is then said to have kicked off. O’Connell underlined that Rumsfeld did not like people disagreeing with him.

About a month on, the anonymous Arab-American businessman received a letter from one of Saddam’s aides proposing to meet in Geneva. He sent a back-channel letter to President Reagan that the Iraqi leader wanted to work closely with the US in the Middle East. He would appreciate an invitation for an official visit to Washington to discuss an alliance, or to meet the US president anywhere else in the world if a Washington reception was not practical, and that they establish confidential communications as part of the alliance [8]. He also wanted to discuss the ongoing war with Iran.

O’Connell said he would route it through the CIA. Not long afterwards, the CIA sent two men to the businessman trying to recruit the Iraqi middleman who had acted as the messenger he’d met in Geneva but the message from Saddam Hussein had not been delivered to Reagan and had never left the CIA. The missed opportunity was not discovered until it was too late but in Jack O’Connell’s view as a professional in the field at the time it “provides an insight into the man the US might have worked with.” [9]

Saddam wanted to replace the Shah in his former role as “America’s man in the Middle East” and to build up business relations with top US companies. His communication via Rumsfeld supported this as well as the initiatives that were attempted through the informal back channels. That this was so is also supported by General Abud Hassan, a former Iraqi Ba’athist revolutionary activist and trained pilot who had flown a MiG out of Iraq. He had joined the exiled Ba’ath officials in Cairo, including the young Saddam, sharing a room with him for almost two years. Abud Hassan went on to work for King Hussein as his chief of Military Intelligence and head of the Jordanian Air Force. He used his diplomatic skills to stop Iraq invading Jordan in 1970 in aid of a Palestinian fedayeen attempted take-over in the civil war that became known as Black September. [10]

Jordan was dependent on cheap Iraqi oil and had been helping to channel arms to Iraq through Aqaba during the Iran-Iraq war acting as a middleman. The king was treated well by Saddam who arranged a small parade for him to go and put flowers on the grave of his late cousin, King Faisal II, saluting the late king at the royal memorial in Baghdad. King Hussein in turn maintained a friendly and pragmatic relationship with Saddam Hussein. He did not back any of the groups that were trying to overthrow the Iraqi President at the time. [11] Saddam would also listen to him. The king had once talked Saddam out of killing Uday after Uday murdered Saddam’s aide. Saddam’s wife, Sajida, had urged him to come to Baghdad to talk Saddam out of killing their son. The king did so and Uday’s life was spared.

Abud Hassan described Saddam as a patriot that had no interest in Islamic fundamentalism, and who was proud, pragmatic and unsparing of his enemies. He admired America and was ready to make a deal with the US president through him at any time. After UN Resolution 598 ended combat between Iran and Iraq on August 8, 1988, President Saddam thought the US, the West and the Sunni Arab states would be grateful that he had opposed the spread of Khomeini’s Shi’a fundamentalist agenda. He thought the Arab states that had provided him with loans to fight the Ayatollah’s regime should do him a return favour and convert those loans to gifts – and that included Kuwait.

However, once the war was over, some players in Israel began to construe Saddam Hussein as constituting ‘an existential threat.’ In Jack O’Connell’s professional view, Saddam’s overtures were ignored or rebuffed by the United States following Israel’s lead. 12 In such vein, anti-Saddam articles consistently began to appear in the international press. Saddam told King Hussein he was surprised that this was going on. Numerous articles bear this out. [13]

One of the Pentagon’s offices was also aware of the anti-Saddam campaign and had published a monograph about it identifying Jewish sources in the States as being responsible. A fortnight after being in circulation the monograph was withdrawn and was not to be seen again. Despite his best efforts, Jack O’Connell could not even get hold of a copy.

Washington’s double-dealing over Kuwait

By 1990, the opportunity for peaceful negotiations between the United States and Iraq had again been lost. Having been spurned Saddam Hussein went on the offensive saying, US navy ships in the Gulf posed a threat to Iraq and he also threatened Israel with a strike if the IDF staged any kind of attack on his country, hearkening back to Israel’s 1981 raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in Osirak. Saddam also accused Kuwait of practising slant drilling to steal Iraq’s oil and of the Kuwaitis exceeding OPEC quotas so as to drive down the oil price. In addition, Kuwait had not forgiven Iraq its debt incurred when fighting Iran. The Iraqi leader accused Kuwait of setting up military installations, police posts and farms on Iraq territory on the border. [14] O’Connell observed that all these grievances were legitimate.

The State Dept. sent a cable via Ambassador April Glaspie to Saddam who was then summoned to a meeting with him on July 25. (Jack O’Connell knew her well as an old friend whom he had also mentored earlier in her career back in the 1960s). Ambassador Glaspie had viewed Saddam as someone the US could negotiate with ‘even if, as she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee a year later, he was a “man who lives by the sword.” [15]

In the event, her meeting with Saddam would be the last formal US meeting with Iraq before Iraq went ahead and invaded Kuwait. According to Jack O’Connell, the Arabic translation of the cable that was delivered to Saddam Hussein was not ambivalent like the now well-known English version. The Arabic version said the problem was between Iraq and Kuwait and that the US could deal with the Kuwaitis on a bilateral basis. It was signed by Secretary of State, James A Baker III, and was intended to provide the US position. Baker’s cable, however, was clearly so ambivalent that Saddam believed he had been given the green light to “redress his grievances” against Kuwait.

April Glaspie’s secret cables to Washington – later declassified – had said of the Iraqi president, “His emphasis that he wants a peaceful settlement is surely sincere. Iraqis are sick of war.” This was later borne out. Saddam Hussein sought a peaceful way out of the crisis. As O’Connell wrote, “the Bush administration’s communications were inconsistent and certainly confusing”.

Three days after Saddam’s meeting with Glaspie, President George Bush Snr. sent a three-paragraph message to him that included the assurance, “Let me reassure you, as my Ambassador, Senator (Robert) Dole and others have done, that my Administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq. We will also continue to support our other friends in the region with whom we have had longstanding ties. We see no necessary inconsistency between these two objectives…” [16]

On August 2, 1990, four Iraqi Republican Guard divisions went into Kuwait and before long Iraq had begun announcing that Kuwait had become Iraq’s nineteenth province (something, that Abd al-Karim Qasim’s administration had originally said of Iraq’s historic claim to Kuwait).

The Bush administration’s willingness to negotiate an end to the invasion of Kuwait was nowhere evident. Glaspie was then scapegoated, and was in London, homeward bound to the United States when the invasion took place. Afterwards, Jack O’Connell found her to be “privately bitter about the way she was treated…” observing that Bush was not going to take the blame for failing to warn Saddam clearly.

Saddam Hussein responded to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia who had called him after hearing the news that Iraq had gone into Kuwait, asking him to limit his troop movements to the border area. Saddam said he was only interested in teaching the Kuwaitis a lesson and was not planning to take control over the country.

At this precise juncture, various Foreign Ministers of the Arab League were convening in Egypt. Jordan’s foreign minister, Marwan Kassim, flew to Alexandria to consult with Egyptian President, Husni Mubarak. They agreed that King Hussein should go to Baghdad the next day to persuade Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait. The plan was approved by King Fahd. Bush then gave King Hussein 48 hours to fulfil the task.

Saddam Hussein indeed met with King Hussein and agreed to start withdrawals within four days providing the Arab ministers did not condemn the invasion or threaten retaliatory force. The king was triumphant but when he returned and broke the news by phone to Mubarak but the Egyptian leader to his surprise said it was “too little, too late” and only an unconditional withdrawal would suffice. King Hussein was taken aback. He had done precisely what he had been asked to do and had achieved the result sought. Marwan Kassim had noticed during this interlude that Mubarak’s top policy advisor had suddenly gone off in a small plane, presumably to Israel. A decision was then pushed onto the desks of those present at the Foreign Ministers’ Conference demanding Iraq’s immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. Jordan and several other Arab states abstained but it was already a done deal and without any debate. The Arabic text put in front of the Foreign Ministers had clearly been translated from English.

Saddam did in fact withdraw some of his troops within the four days stipulated as he had said he would despite his own conditions not having been met but the US ignored this and proceeded to organise a massive coalition of Western and Arab states. Bush sent troops and equipment into Saudi, telling journalists he had given “a friendly Arab leader (King Hussein) forty-eight hours to persuade Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, but he failed.” The truth of King Hussein’s successful meeting with Saddam had not been told. [17]

The Bush administration’s UN representative and his Jordanian counterpart had also suggested measures which might be taken to answer Iraq’s grievances against Kuwait in exchange for a peaceful withdrawal. Baker called Bush who had replied “We can live with that.” King Hussein was to pass the message on to Saddam but none of the Jordanian officials passed this message on to the King at all and O’Connell summed it up as owing to the king and some of his advisors having different agendas, some of which revolved around those that were managing arms supplies to Iraq, ‘ betting the US would not risk American lives to drive Saddam from Kuwait’ and opposed a US-mediated negotiation.

Jordan’s Prime Minister, Mudar Badran, led the pro-Saddam group that was betting on Saddam winning and it was believed that it was he who had blocked the message.

King Hussein then declared that he would fly straight to Washington and on to Maine to meet with President Bush. The King’s group together with Secretary of State, James Baker, flew on to Maine and the president’s vacation home in Kennebunkport. King Hussein was still pursuing strategies for negotiation with Saddam but by then Bush had “given way to his ultimate hard line position.” King Hussein’s relations with Bush deteriorated after this. King Hussein’s aides had left Jack O’Connell and Dick Viets behind in Jordan despite having agreed to take them along, ostensibly so they could not share their intel. with the king beforehand so they made their own arrangements and flew from Jordan to the United States to keep abreast of developments.

It emerged clearly from the account given by Jack O’Connell that the same lobby that had prevented King Hussein from successfully brokering peace between Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians for so many years was acting in precisely the same fashion over the United States having friendly relations restored with Iraq. Behind the pretext of an interest in peace lay a hard-line, pro-Israel reality. O’Connell summed it up thus writing, “Clearly some of Bush’s more hard-line aides saw Saddam as a tyrant and a threat to Israel and wanted to engage him in battle, not negotiations. “ [18]

The Gulf War and beyond

King Hussein refused to join the coalition and became the only Arab leader willing to continue his relations with Saddam. The Coalition Forces came to number 950,000 troops, involving thirty-four countries. Three quarters of them were American.

O’Connell said: “Whatever it may have cost him, the king was right. The US could have, and should have, negotiated an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. It we had only given Saddam the respect he craved, there’s no doubt in my mind that we could have come away with terms that would have made more than a decade of sanctions, no-fly zone enforcement, escalating hostility, weapons inspections, and finally, the second Iraq war in 2003 unnecessary.” [19]

O’Connell emphasised that Richard N. Perle and the neo-cons were “having none of negotiation, to say nothing of the Israelis, who handled the Iraq problem more cleverly than the Palestinian problem. Ironically, the only consistent peacemaker, King Hussein, was castigated by the United States for failing to join the US military coalition”. He described how a group of hardliners under Perle’s leadership had talked Bush out of sending Baker to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam Hussein on the very eve of war by arguing that Saddam could take Baker hostage.

Instead, Baker went on to deliver a humiliating letter to Tariq Aziz in Paris knowing in advance it would be rejected because he then read the remarks, already written, assuming the rejection would come. [20]

Operation Desert Storm was launched on January 16, 1991. The war lasted forty-three days. Overthrowing Saddam had not been part of that war’s mandate. “Bush’s son would not be so wise”, O’Connell notes. There had been one policy for peace and one for war presented at the same time and Saddam did not know what Washington’s real policy was because they ran two policies at the same time, one pushing for war and another talking of peace. It was no wonder he did not know how to respond. All they were doing was confusing him. “That’s no way to make policy” O’Connell lamented to a colleague. [21]

Washington and some senior Jordanian officials also tried to shut up Queen Noor for pointing out the humanitarian suffering brought about by their actions.

Ahmad Chalabi was among the group visiting Washington at the invitation of the Council on Foreign Relations in March 1991. They spoke to the House International Affairs Committee although the State Department would not see them. Chalabi later recalled in an interview with PBS that the group’s relations with the Bush government developed through Congress through the summer and autumn of that year at the time the two No-Fly Zones were put in place.

Overtures to Saddam by Yitzhak Rabin and by Jimmy Carter – miscommunication and mishandling [22]

Even after the Gulf War and imposition of crippling sanctions Israeli hard-liners and US neo-cons portrayed Saddam as a threat and sought to topple him. [23] Conversely, Israel’s liberal Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin and former US President, Jimmy Carter, separately wanted to re-engage with Saddam.

According to O’Connell, Yitzhak Rabin considered that “Iraq would be a buffer against Iran, which was a much greater potential threat to Israel than Iraq. He was also aware that Iraq was the economic plum of the Eastern Arab world, with water, oil, and an educated workforce. As economic partners both Israel and Iraq would prosper… He asked King Hussein to pass on a message to Saddam saying he would travel to Baghdad and raise Saddam’s hand in the public square, extolling the partnership between the two countries.” [24]

This is borne out by a second source, Nigel Ashton, the British author of King Hussein: A Political Life. Haaretz says he claimed, “In early summer 1995, a few months before his assassination, prime minister Yitzhak Rabin asked Jordan’s King Hussein to approach Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on his behalf and arrange a joint visit by Rabin and Hussein to Baghdad.” [25]

As for the Carter proposal, Jack O’Connell and Dick Viets put Carter’s principal advisor in touch with Iraq’s former ambassador to the US, Nizar Hamdoon [26], who in 1992-1998 was in post as Iraq’s representative to the UN. Carter’s head of staff and Nizar Hamdoon met several times to work out the “logistics and substance of a meeting between Saddam and Carter to be held in Baghdad. Hamdoon (Hamdun) was interested. So was Saddam.” Hamdoon had also set up the US-Iraq Business Forum in 1985. (The Forum was “supported entirely by dues of $5,000 a year for companies with sales of more than $500 million or $2,500 for smaller companies and its role was limited.”) [27]

King Hussein was negative when he was told about it arguing that the timing was bad and informed O’Connell and Viets about Yitzhak Rabin’s hope of reaching an agreement with Saddam. He told them that he feared that a Carter visit would complicate things and asked them to cancel it or wait. O’Connell and Viets felt that Rabin’s proposal was “so out of line with the official Israeli position and Israeli hardliners that they questioned the accuracy of King Hussein’s understanding of the situation. Viets who had previously been based in Israel slipped across the Jordanian border to see the Israeli President, Ezer Weizman, in Jerusalem who said positively of Rabin’s idea “You are absolutely right, and there are several in the government who feel the same way.”

When Viets then asked him whether the US would support it, Weizman said the US had already stopped two Israeli attempts to make a deal with Saddam.

Rabin’s proposal was never accurately conveyed to Saddam Hussein, and Carter’s friendly intervention also failed, the latter because an (unnamed)wealthy Lebanese businessman friend of Carter’s had found out about it and wanted to meet Saddam. He contacted an Iraqi Ba’athist source close to the government, who was active in business in Paris and whose brother was an Iraqi official. O’Connell does not name any of them.

The Lebanese businessman and his Iraqi counterpart represented an (unnamed) American oil company and hoped to obtain favours for the company in Iraq if they facilitated the meeting between Carter and Saddam. The Lebanese entrepreneur offered to help, and Carter accepted. The pair then took over the negotiations from O’Connell and Viets to try to set up the visit. O’Connell and Viets then backed out. But Saddam sent a message back saying he thought Carter was dealing through the wrong people and should cancel the meeting in the best interests of both countries. “End of talk. End of meeting. End of another opportunity,” O’Connell said resignedly.

King Hussein, for his part, had not wished to deliver Yitzhak Rabin’s message to Saddam personally and had delegated it to a senior Jordanian official (unnamed) who “did not believe in the mission, so he garbled the message. He did not tell Saddam that the message was from Rabin but was from some prominent American Jews from Detroit who were close to Rabin and acting on his behalf.”

Saddam Hussein’s response to that was that he did not want Jordan telling him how he should act toward Israel. O’Connell notes “Whether he would have given the envoy a different answer if he knew the message came from Rabin is a good question.” [28]

Alas, it would never be known because on November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish militant, Yigal Amir, when leaving a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Saddam frees the two American Kuwait based contractors

One meeting that went ahead as planned on Sunday July16, 1995 involved the Democrat congressman from New Mexico, Bill Richardson. He planned to try to meet with Saddam Hussein to ask him to pardon two US defense military contractors, William Barloon and David Daliberti, who had been working in Kuwait who were said to have wandered across the border into Iraq by mistake when going to visit friends at a UN post monitoring the border. They had been captured by Iraqi border guards and taken to Baghdad. There they had been tried and convicted for illegally entering the country and were duly down sent to Abu Ghraib prison to begin eight-year sentences. The Iraqis had believed that the two American defence engineers were really spies but had not been able to prove it. President Clinton found their sentence and incarceration in Iraq humiliating.

Richardson had been talking with Nizar Hamdoon for almost three months when he was finally told if he brought a letter from President Clinton, Saddam Hussein would be lenient. He was duly ushered into the office at the presidential palace palatial where he was greeted by Saddam Hussein, Tariq Aziz and eight to ten Iraqi aides and security personnel. He had with him three useful contacts that included Mary King [29] well known to many Iraqi officials. [30] O’Connell observed, unaware of Arab customs he mistakenly crossed his legs when seated opposite Saddam showing him the sole of his shoe. Saddam then got up and walked out, his face smouldering. After the cultural situation was explained and that this was considered an insult, numerous apologies were made so Saddam returned, and the session resumed. Richardson described his role to Saddam and the Iraqi leader asked him if he had brought a letter from Clinton. Richardson had replied that President Carter thought his own presence at the meeting in Baghdad to be more significant than a letter, so he had not brought one.

One of the those present in the delegation was Peter Bourne who had experience of negotiating sensitive situations. Together with his, his wife, Mary E. King, who was formerly the executive director of the US-Iraq Business Forum, and Calvin Humphrey, staff member of the House Intelligence Committee on which Richardson served met Saddam. Bourne noted of this meeting in greater detail than O’Connell’s second-hand account:, “The Iraqi leader then gave an interesting and thoughtful thirty-minute review of US/Iraqi relations over the previous twenty years, coming perilously close to saying his invasion of Kuwait had been a mistake. At the crucial moment he stopped and said “Well, that’s another story.” Part of the deal for the prisoner release was that we would visit the Saddam Hussein Children’s hospital to see the “terrible” impact of the US embargo on the sick children of Iraq. Their hope was that we would make a statement against the embargo that they could use… Part of the deal we had worked out with the Iraqis was that the White House would put out a press release generally expressing gratitude for the release of the two prisoners. Bill and I carefully wrote out the text of the release embodying various key elements and phrases we had agreed to. We read it over the phone to the White House. Within hours a statement was put out to the media that differed sharply from what we had drafted. It was more contentious and provocative without the key (and frankly quite benign) phrases we had agreed with the Iraqis. Richardson angrily called the White House to complain that they under cut him and made it seem he was not a man of his word. “What do you care. You already have the prisoners” was the response. I was astonished that the Clinton White House was willing to let the word of the US mean so little. For no possible benefit we had created a self-inflicted wound by sending the message-America can not be trusted to honor an agreement. This was and is something particularly sensitive in the Arab world where a man’s word is his bond…”

Saddam had made a little play out of the situation saying, “Many Iraqis wanted pardons that I have not granted, so if I get a letter from the American president and automatically pardon the Americans, it will make me look like an American stooge.” He said he would have put such a letter away in his drawer and would have released the prisoners satisfied with the American president’s courtesy in writing it. Richardson then apologised. The prisoners were released to the delegates at the former US Embassy that was by then occupied by a Polish diplomatic representative handling US affairs as formal relations with the US had ceased.

The official Iraqi News Agency (INA) said “President Saddam Hussein told Richardson that he accepts the plea by President Bill Clinton, the Congress and American people. “His excellency issued an order . . . to pardon the two detainees and set them free immediately.” ‘Their spouses said the men had strayed into Iraqi territory while trying to visit friends at a U.N. observation post on the border.’31 Both later said at their press conference in Amman they had been “treated fairly”. Daliberti said he had a history of heart trouble and that Iraqis took great care to provide them both with medical facilities and doctors available around the clock.32 Barloon had been living with his wife, Linda, and three children in Kuwait, working as a civilian employee for McConnell Douglas before his capture. Linda Barloon was on a business trip to Singapore when her husband was suddenly set free.

O’Connell noted that Richardson had also believed it was possible to work with Saddam Hussein. A local report said, “Richardson, describing the Iraqi leader as “tough,” said Saddam “showed warmth at certain times.” He said that when Saddam informed him of his decision to pardon the two Americans, he grabbed the Iraqi leader’s hand in a spontaneous show of thanks. “I think it was purely a human gesture that he appreciated,” Richardson said. “My hope is that while our countries may have differences, perhaps there’s hope for a better relationship.” [33]

The INC, INA, CIA: the Coup plots against Saddam

Alas, just one month after this propitious visit, Saddam’s two sons-in-law defected to Jordan with their wives, Saddam’s daughters – Raghad, and Rana, along with a group of Iraqi military officers arriving in Amman in a convoy of Mercedes-Benzes. King Hussein immediately granted them asylum and accommodated them at the al-Hashimiya Palace. (The palace was traditionally used for visiting heads of state and dignitaries until 1997 after which King Hussein and Queen Noor determined that it become an orphanage.)  [34]

O’Connell emphasised. “The defections served to energise Ahmed Chalabi of the INC and Iyad Allawi of the INA who were plotting to overthrow Saddam.”

That same summer the CIA got involved in a “poor covert operation” with the INA led by Iyad Allawi that was pushed forward by Clinton. For once, King Hussein agreed to go along with it. Jordanian intelligence worked directly with the INA’s field office in Amman and the CIA officers based there. [35]

In a press conference in February 1996, Allawi openly boasted both about the presence of the INA office in Amman and of the planned operation itself. This coincided with the Baghdad return of Saddam’s two treacherous sons-in-law, with their wives and entourage. Saddam’s daughters were told to divorce their husbands. The demise of their treacherous husbands can only have been expected. Even tribal law would have acted in this way.

In March 1996, Ahmad Chalabi had been the driving force behind the plot to attack Iraq from Kurdistan with CIA personnel helping him with the planning. However, back at headquarters, the CIA superiors got cold feet and told Chalabi they were withdrawing the support of the agency. By the following September, Iraq had attacked and destroyed the INC’s base in Kurdistan sending the plotters and their CIA helpers scurrying for their lives into Turkey. [36]

On June 23, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article that read “With CIA’s help, Group in Jordan Targets Saddam; U.S. Funds Support Campaign to Topple Iraqi Leader from Afar.” It said President Clinton had authorised US 6 million for the operation and quoted Allawi saying, “We believe the end is near. We have entered the final chapter in salvaging Iraq.”

Iraqi Intelligence had by then thoroughly penetrated the coup plot. In July 1996, several dozen Iraqis working with the INA and CIA were rounded up and executed for treason and the satellite equipment they had used to communicate with CIA officers in Amman from Iraq were seized. 37Iraqi agents then called them back on their own equipment to tell them so.

Chalabi’s double game

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Senator John McCain all paid Chalabi close attention. The five signed an open letter to Clinton in February 1998 calling upon the White House to promote regime change in Iraq that some say was largely motivated by y Chalabi and that took effect just eight months later. Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation and the INC began to receive its monthly stipends of $340 000 dollars.

The Iraq Liberation Act was passed by Congress in September 1998 with “enthusiastic bipartisan support” and pushed hard for by the Clinton administration, Ahmad Chalabi’s INC became the major beneficiary of the State Department payments that would subsidise it to the tune of $97 million. The INC formed in 1992 included the KDP and PUK. O’Connell noted that Wolfowitz… strongly supported the notion that an Iraqi insurgency could topple Saddam with some support from the US military. He and the neo-cons had fallen for Chalabi because Chalabi articulated everything they wanted to hear.” [38]

After Chalabi’s death in 2015 of natural causes, those friends in high place that had always blown his trumpet continued to do so whilst his detractors steadily buffed the gloss from the tale. Seth Frantzman’s opinion piece for the Jerusalem Post set out the panorama of opinions but his sub-title said it all – The enduring legacy of the delusion of Iraqi democracy and the rise of Iran. Frantzman cited Seth Lipsky of the Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward,(also the founder of an English version (and journalist with the Wall Street Journal) who noted that Chalabi was telling American Jews that the Jews would be able to return to Iraq when celebrating the passing of the Iraq Liberation Act. [39] His original clique had comprised Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Hannah, Michael Ledeen, and Danielle Pletka… U.S. senators like Trent Lott, John McCain, Sam Brownback, Joe Lieberman, and Bob Kerrey became his champions… He courted key Republicans like Trent Lott’s Randy Scheunemann and House international affairs staffer Steve Rademaker, as well as Senate Democratic aides like Chris Straub and Peter Galbraith. [40]

But nothing could have been further from the truth. He had for decades been working directly with Israel’s arch enemies in Tehran. One of his brothers was an affluent businessman living in Tehran where several other family members were based. In 2011 when the US pulled the bulk of its military from Iraq Chalabi was still passing intelligence to Iran and Iraq was being plundered by the Iran-backed groups. Even the banks were being robbed by those handed power just as Chalabi had been accused of doing with Petra Bank. If he had been innocent of embezzlement, why did he flee?

The false claim circulated by his daughter, Tamara Chalabi that Jordan together with Saddam’s Iraq had set him up was just another deceit dreamed up to conceal the truth [41]. A Jordanian court had found Chalabi guilty and had sentenced him to a term of 22 years in prison. Many of the bank’s bad loans were to Chalabi-linked companies…A similar pattern of questionable transactions was also found by the auditors of Chalabi’s brothers’ financial institutions, Socofi, an investment company in Geneva and Mebco with branches in Geneva and Beirut, as well as Petra International in Washington in which Ahmad’s brother Talal had a 30% stake. Chalabi also had interests in Jordan-based companies, Al-Rimal and Abhara. The Geneva and Beirut banks collapsed in a chain reaction in 1989. [42]  The family had previously been the bankers for the Shi’a clerics after the Ba’ath had finally taken power. [43] Before that, during the Hashemite kingdom of Iraq they had run Iraq’s National Bank. The family also ran a gold dealing business in London, SCF. [44] They had stakes in two other banks, Jordan Gulf Bank and Cairo-Amman Bank. [45] Mebco Beirut under his brother Jawad, was the main backer of Shi’a militia Amal leader, Nabih Berri. Petra was bankrolling Crown Prince Hassan and his military officers, loaning him 20 million dollars in ten years. Jordan also linked the long hand of Chalabi with the assassination of the Iraqi Ambassador to Amman in August 2003. [46]

Chalabi had long since begun his propaganda drive speaking at university gatherings at SOAS in London and Georgetown in Washington whilst cultivating journalists, politicians and academics like Bernard Lewis to impress on them after the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein could be toppled. [47] He went on to head the Iraqi Governing Council for a time. Frantzman said that an INC cohort informed him, Chalabi had said ‘We had better start working on a plan to get the US out of Iraq once Saddam is gone.’

Jack O’Connell believed that more than any other player, it was Ahmad Chalabi who had been responsible for the 2003 war against Iraq going ahead not to mention the dismantlement of the state structures, the Iraqi Army and witch hunt against the most able functionaries of the country. He wanted to be king. [48]

Chalabi supported the Shi’a crescent AKA what has developed into the Axis of Resistance and acted as an active channel for the late IRGC QF leader, Qasim Soleimani. He had moved to Lebanon in 1971 and married Leila Osseiran, the daughter of Shi’a Lebanese statesman, Adel Osseiran, in a wedding presided over by Imam Musa Sadr. His elder brother, Hassan had founded the Islamic University there. The couple moved to Amman in 1976 where he founded Petra Bank and became close to Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifai and certain Palestinian groups as well as Hezbollah and their creator, the IRGC. Chalabi had supported Iran in the war against Iraq. Petra Bank collapsed in 1989. He was accused of embezzling $300 million. An academic research paper of February 18, 2004, published by Stratfor paper titled Ahmad Chalabi and His Iranian Connection wrote, “In March 2001, Chalabi traveled to Tehran to meet with senior leaders. He set up an office for the INC in the capital that was to be paid for with U.S. aid — and that required a special waiver from Washington because of U.S. sanctions…

“Somewhat less known is an alternative explanation for the Petra Bank collapse. Sources in Jordan and Israel long have argued that the bank collapsed because Chalabi was collaborating with the Iranians in financing the Iranian war effort and trying to undermine Iraq’s war financing. When the Iran-Iraq war ended in defeat for Tehran, Iraq placed enormous pressure on Jordan to shut down the bank, which was managing the flow of money through Chalabi-controlled banks in Lebanon… “

Ahmad’s brother, Jawad Chalabi was running Mebco (Middle East Banking Company) in Lebanon. Auditors, Arthur Andersen’s investigation indicated that Petra assets were being used to keep Mebco afloat, and vice versa. [49] The Jordanian Central Bank went to the Banque du Liban (Lebanon’s central bank) for restitution, given that Petra assets were reported as being in Mebco’s hands. “But they ended up asking us to repay them, ” Jordanian Central Bank governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi said. “It was the same with Switzerland.” Mebco was liquidated by the Lebanese authorities in 1989, just as its Swiss branch’s licence was being taken away by the Swiss authorities for lax accounting and poor liquidity.

That effectively shut it down as well, leaving Jawad and a third brother, Hazem, facing six-month suspended sentences in Switzerland. Another family investment vehicle, Socofi, was also closed down by the Swiss authorities.”

Ahmad Chalabi began working openly against Saddam Hussein openly in the 1990s and operated out of the Barzani fiefdom of Salahaddin, building the INC’s infrastructure having entered via Iran. CIA money to the INC for use in Iraqi Kurdistan was also said to have been ‘redirected.’ [50] The same occurred during the 2000-2003 period. See the report of the State Department, Issues Affecting Funding of Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation of April 2004, which opens by saying “As part of long-standing efforts by the United States to oust Saddam Hussein, the Iraq Liberation Act of 19981 noted that regime change in Iraq should be the policy of the United States.

Consistent with that act and other legislation, a critical element of U.S. policy included funding the Iraqi National Congress as the lead Iraqi opposition coalition. In 1999, the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation (INCSF) was established to provide an organizational structure for Department of State funding. From March 2000 until September 2003, the State Department provided funds to the INCSF for several programs, including planning for the renewal of Radio Hurriah broadcasts and establishing new satellite television capability (Liberty TV), newspaper publication, and public information and information collection programs. 2 INCSF’s broadcasting goals included direct radio and television broadcasts into Iraq focusing on providing the Iraqi people unbiased news and information and updating them on efforts to bring democracy to the country…” [51] With its headquarters in London “INCSF also maintained field offices in Washington, D.C.; Damascus, Syria; and Tehran, Iran. In April and May 2003, INCSF began the process of relocating its offices to Baghdad…

“In the very early stages of State’s agreements with INCSF, State received strong indications that INCSF had inadequate controls over cash transfers. For example, in the year 2000, a CPA firm reviewed INCSF’s controls as part of Agreement 1. The review identified concerns about INCSF’s travel reimbursement procedures, use of non-U.S. flag-carriers, and its cash payment practices. Also that year, State notified INCSF that it needed to rectify certain compliance issues before it could draw down funds. These issues included INCSF’s lack of proper documentation to support expenditures and the questionable use of cash payments. In early 2001, another CPA audit examined INCSF’s operations as part of State’s agreements and identified significant noncompliance and control issues affecting implementation of Agreement 2. According to a State document, the auditor “appear[ed] to confirm what we [State] suspected—that the INCSF is not complying with the myriad of regulations that grantees are required to comply with.”

Chalabi had once asked Jack O’Connell if he could help speed up CIA payments. O’Connell was not in any position to help but would still agree to the occasional lunch.

In that same period in the late 1980s through the early sanctions period, Iraq was using different bankers in Jordan, close to the king, whereas Chalabi operated with Crown Prince Hassan, whom the king later replaced for succession with his son.

Wall Street investigator Jules Kroll, concerning Iraq’s procurement effort in Jordan, said “the Iraqi government transferred $5.2 billion in government funds to the Arab Bank in Amman just as Operation Desert Storm was ending, to establish a new trading infrastructure for Iraq. In addition to this, he alleged that the Central Bank of Jordan was laundering secret Iraqi government funds in Switzerland through commercial banks such as Jordan’s Housing Bank, the Jordan Gulf Bank, and the Arab Financial Corporation. Local bankers in Amman quietly confirmed that they were financing Iraqi imports through Jordan and trading in Iraqi commercial paper, but refused to provide details. When confronted with allegations that an Iraqi diplomat in Amman, Khaled Marzoumi, was closely linked to Iraqi front companies known to have procured goods for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, Crown Prince Hassan responded unequivocally. “If a detailed presentation of these charges is made to us by a foreign embassy, we would consider closing down this office and expelling the individuals in question.” Marzoumi ran Iraq’s Trade delegation in Amman, and shared an office with Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO). In 1988-89, he was instrumental in the operation of Babil International, an Iraqi front company registered in France that was controlled by Safa Habobi of TDG and was used for procurement and for financial transactions on behalf of the Iraqi government…” [52]

So, who was O’Connell’s unnamed Arab American businessman with channels to Geneva and American oil wanting to discuss the Aqaba pipeline? Saddam refused to meet former President Jimmy Carter over this man and his counterpart’s involvement. The key American oil companies at the time were Bechtel Oil, Exxon, Hunt Oil, Kellogg Brown Root (KBR) later Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, and El Paso Corp. [53] Operation Iraqi Liberation = OIL.

Chalabi and the Ayatollahs

According to his former vehicle, the INC, Chalabi “spoke to U.S. officials in Washington from Tehran while he was meeting not only with Iranian officials, but also with Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI)… During that meeting, Chalabi was quoted as saying, “Our alliance with Iran is not temporary.”

Again in January 2003, before a planned meeting of Iraqi opposition leaders in London, Chalabi visited Tehran to meet with al-Hakim. In February 2003 after a stop off in Tehran, Chalabi arrived in Kurdistan where he mustered some 700 Free Iraqi Forces (FIF), under Colonel Ahmad Tiba, some of whom were put together in Hungary by US Special Forces ready for the opening of the war on Iraq. Another 200 Iran-trained Badr fighters waited ready in the Sirwan River Valley (Arabic, Upper Diyala) in Sulaimaniyah governorate under the PUK’s control.

As the invasion of Iraq moved to its inevitable conclusion, a US military plane under the directives of Paul Wolfowitz flew Chalabi from Kurdistan to the Shi’a city of An Nasiriyah on April 6 to be the first exiled leader to return on parade. [54]  He addressed people from the balcony of the Ba’ath headquarters in the city. Nasiriyah has since become on the most vocal cities against post-2003 power-sharing government.

As the Stratfor paper aptly stated of this manoeuvre:

“It was a symbolic gesture, intended to demonstrate that the INC was part of the fighting coalition. U.S. intelligence about Iraq was terrible. It was wrong about WMD; it underestimated the extent to which the Shia in the south had been organized by Iranian intelligence prior to the war; it was wrong about how the war would end — predicting unrest, but not predicting a systematic guerrilla war. An enormous amount of this intelligence — and certainly critical parts of it — came to the United States by way of the INC or by channels the INC or its members were involved in cultivating. All of it was wrong. It was not only wrong, it created an irresistible process. The WMD issue has delegitimized the war in the eyes of a substantial number of Americans. The failure to understand the dynamic of the Shiite community led to miscalculations about the nature of postwar Iraqi politics. The miscalculation about the guerrilla war created a U.S. dependence upon the Shia that is still unfolding…The U.S. position in Iraq is securely on Shiite terms, and that means it is on Iranian terms…” [55] 

General David Petreaus had been told by Qasim Soleimani as early as 2008 that it was he and the IRGC-QF that controlled Iran’s policy in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Chalabi had also worked with his predecessor, IRGC-QF Brigadier General Ahmed Frouzanda, before and after the 2003 war. [56]

Chalabi’s biographer, Aram Rostun, claims, “Middle East intelligence sources maintain that Chalabi’s operation collecting Baathist files and documents after the U.S. invasion was useful for the Iranians. One intelligence source alleged in an interview that “He gave intelligence documents to the Iranian MOIS.” [57]

It was not until the US raid on Chalabi’s Baghdad home in Mansour near the Hunting Club authorised by the White House that the US Defense Department at last cut off its payments to the INC of $342,000 per month.

Jane Mayer, writing for the New Yorker observed back in May 2004: “The raid took place amid allegations that Chalabi or other members of the I.N.C. had engaged in numerous misdeeds, including embezzlement, theft, and kidnapping. After Baghdad police began investigating these charges, several of Chalabi’s top lieutenants fled Iraq…One of them, Aras Karim Habib, the I.N.C.’s intelligence chief, escaped just before the serving of an arrest warrant. He is under investigation for passing classified U.S. government information to Iran…” [58]

He had fled to Iran. [59]

The Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which devoted huge effort to planning for the war was overseen by Douglas Feith. “Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all of the members of his organization” a State Department official told Jane Mayer. [60]

Rice and Hadley – Bush’s Security Advisors No 1 and No. 2

Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley played leading roles in disseminating false information to push for war and oil was prominent in their policy.

In June 2004, Rice in post as Bush’s National Security Advisor [61] assured the Turkmen, Sunni Arabs and Turkey that Kirkuk would not be ceded to the KRG. She repeated it years later in 2016. This can be read in emails from Stephen Hadley (then in post as Deputy National Security Advisor) to Bill Clinton. Copied in were Jim Jones, and James Jeffery. The pipeline would also be re-opened for Kirkuk oil to transit Turkey.

Rice’s former employer was Chevron Texaco. The first big shipments of Iraqi oil began in June 28, 2003. “The first supertanker to load Iraqi crude began filling up at Mina al-Bakr. The buyer of the oil was Condoleezza Rice’s old employer, ChevronTexaco. A few dozen hours later, the tanker, loaded with two million barrels of crude known as Basra Light, left Mina al-Bakr and headed straight for refineries – in the United States. Over the next few months, dozens of other supertankers begin filling their holds with Iraqi oil, and the majority of those tankers headed for the United States…With U.S. troops guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry in downtown Baghdad and Halliburton employees manning the controls at Mina al-Bakr and other oil facilities, the Bush administration had achieved its goal: the second-largest oil reserves on earth were under the control of the United States…In Iraq, the U.S. government, the military, corporate America, and the oil business became one.” [62]

Jack O’Connell did not live to tell what came after 2010 nor could he say more when Chalabi and many others were still alive and immensely wealthy – the threat of crippling libel suits have overtaken much freedom of reporting in the media. O’Connell passed away in 2010 and the book came out a year after his death with the assistance of co-author, Vernon Loeb.

Ahmad Chalabi died of a heart attack in 2015. In Frantzman’s view, “Chalabi represents more what is wrong with present-day Iraq than the supposed “Iraq of old” that his friends imagine he belonged to. Ineffective, Shi’ite and willing to turn a blind eye to anyone, couching all of it behind pragmatism, when inviting Shi’ite militias and Iran to run the Middle East is not pragmatism, but a clear agenda.” [63]

All along, the same has been true of al-Da’wa, SCIRI/Badr and their pro-Khomeini Iraqi leaders that the US and UK supported before and after destroying Saddam Hussein.

Whatever the supporters of the war on Iraq still seek to maintain about it being legitimate twenty years on, the facts speak otherwise – but who has paid the price?

1 Jack O’Connell, with Vernon Loeb, WW Norton & Co, 2011
2 Noam Chomsky had observed that in 1982, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states that sponsor terror, permitting it to receive enormous credits for the purchase of U.S. exports while the U.S. became a major market for its oil.” Apr. 4, 1991 article “What We Say Goes,” published in Z Magazine.
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6usnxFisNPA
4 “In 1980, Shultz presided over the reorganisation of the company into three main divisions – Bechtel Power, Bechtel Petroleum, and Bechtel Civil & Minerals – the precursors of the company’s current four global business units…In 1982, he returned to government as Secretary of State under President Reagan…When the Reagan presidency ended, Shultz rejoined Bechtel in 1989 as a director and served until April 26, 2006…” https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/george-schultz-former-bechtel-president-and-cabine/
5 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1984/06/05/issue.html
6 See https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2003/0409secret.htm and also parts of a somewhat biased and flawed report that noted July 1985: Pipeline promoters hire James Schlesinger (the former Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Defense, and Director of the CIA) and William B. Clark, Reagan’s former National Security Advisor. August 1, 1985: Clark meets with Iraqi officials in Baghdad. He makes little progress. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326673206_Crude_Vision_How_Oil_Interests_Obscured_US_Government_Focus_On_Chemical_Weapons_Use_by_Saddam_Hussein.
7 https://www.adst.org/OH%20TOCs/Viets,%20Richard%20N.toc.pdf See pp.88-90
8 O’Connell, p.160.
9 Ibid. P. 161.
10 https://www.cia.gov/static/a0e9e907ebef070b8d13a714867f1e5b/Black-September-Jordan.pdf See p. 36
11 O’Connell, p.163.
12 O’Connell, p.165
13 See Bob Dreyfuss, contributing writer at The Nation — Abram Shulsky and the AIPAC https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/20/iraq-symposium/
14 O’Connell, p. 166
15 Ibid, p.166
16 Ibid, p. 168.
17 Ibid, p.175.
18 O’Connell, p.178.
19 Ibid, p.177.
20 Ibid, p. 177.
21 Ibid, p.179.
22 Extracts from chapter 16: Missed Opportunities, Miscalculations, and Mistakes
23 O’Connell, p. 192.
24 O’Connell, p. 193.
25 https://www.haaretz.com
26 https://www.washingtonpost.com
27 https://www.nytimes.com/1990/08/20/business/international-report-fledgling-us-iraqi-trade-group-says-it-feels-betrayed.html The Forum was created by US lawyer Marshall Wiley, former diplomat in Baghdad for US interests. “Mr. Wiley cited a steady expansion in the forum’s membership – the Exxon Company International was among seven that joined this spring – and said the organization ”has worked reasonably well” in contributing to an expansion in two-way trade between the countries to $1.5 billion in the first quarter of this year, about double the level for the comparable 1989 period. Iraq had said it would spend about $35 billion or more on its development in the early 1990’s, implying an even greater expansion in its trade with the United States…” In another article, Wiley had “ accused the American press of “biased” reporting that, he charged, focuses on “the worst aspects of what Iraq has done” and overlooks the progress Iraq is making. What is rarely reported, he added, is that under Hussein’s leadership Iraq is developing “an education and health infrastructure” and drafting a new constitution that promises “to broaden political participation.” See https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/04/25/iraq-s-hussein-dangerous-dictator-or-stabilizer/.
28 Ibid, p. 196.
29 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-16-mn-1017-story.html
30 See full report http://www.petergbourne.co.uk/articles8.html.
31 https://www.washingtonpost.com
32 https://www.deseret.com/1995/7/17/19182760/freed-americans-say-they-weren-t-mistreated
33 Ibid.
34 http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/royal_palaces.html
35 King Hussein’s treatment for kidney cancer in the Mayo clinic in the US had been unsuccessful and he finally passed away in Jordan on February 7, 1999, never having seen peace achieved between the US, Israel and the Palestinians or the US and Iraq despite his lifelong endeavour.
36 Ibid, p. 222.
37 O’Connell, p. 202.
38 O’Connell, p. 223.
39 Lipsky, a self-described neo-con, was asked to resign from the paper after publishing opinions in praise of Ronald Reagan and the Vietnam war as worth fighting. See details at: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/14/nyregion/metro-business-newspaper-founder-resigns-under-fire.html
40 https://www.npr.org/2008/03/14/88251909/writer-aram-roston-parsing-ahmad-chalabis-past
41 https://www.salon.com/2004/05/04/petra/
42 Ibid.
43 https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2015/11/03/ahmed-chalabi-suffers-a-heart-attack
44 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/14/iraq.davidleigh noted alsoThe Daily Telegraph, owned by Conrad Black, who has on one of his boards the prominent Pentagon hawk and Chalabi supporter Richard Perle, published a flattering profile of Mr Chalabi last year, characterising him as “the de Gaulle of Iraq”. The article did not refer to his conviction or the collapse of Petra Bank at all.
45 http://www.channelingreality.com/documents/history/chalabi_history_from_1983.pdf
46 https://www.jeuneafrique.com/56179/archives-thematique/jusqu-o-ira-chalabi/
47 Op. Cit. Frantzman.
48 https://www.jpost.com/opinion/terra-incognita-ahmed-chalabi-the-man-who-would-be-king-432415 See also more links in this chain https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/sunset
49 http://www.channelingreality.com/documents/history/chalabi_history_from_1983.pdf
50 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2953109.stm
51 https://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20040724084637/http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04559.pdf
52 P. 23 of a 231-page document on the banking sphere’s political links at http://www.channelingreality.com/documents/history/chalabi_history_from_1983.pdf
53 https://money.cnn.com/2004/10/11/news/fortune500/iraq_oil/index.htm See also https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/2002/08jim.htm
54 https://www.jeuneafrique.com/56179/archives-thematique/jusqu-o-ira-chalabi/
55 https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/ahmad-chalabi-and-his-iranian-connection
56 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/iranian-agent-influence-interview-author-new-ahmad-chalabi-biography/
57 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24050898
58 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/07/the-manipulator
59 https://www.jeuneafrique.com/56179/archives-thematique/jusqu-o-ira-chalabi/
60 Ibid.
61 Rice was nominated by Bush to become Secretary of State on November 16, 2004 and confirmed in hearings on 18 and 19 January 2005, succeeding Colin Powell.
62 See: Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America’s Superstate by Robert Bryce. https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2004-06-18/216889/
63 Ibid, Frantzman.

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for Ekurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

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