Archive for category: War

Summary: In this series of posts, I examine somefunkiness regarding the story of Mahdi Obeidi, the Iraqi nuclearscientist who claimed to have buried a nuclear centrifuge under hisrose plant. In part one, I lay out a timeline for his story. Parts two and three examine some problems with the materials he turned over. Part four questions the stories Obeidi and Pitzer told about their meeting. Part five looks the WaPo articlethat is a central prop in Obeidi’s story. Part six examines some of the tensions within the intelligenceagencies dealing with Obeidi. This post summarizes the evidence presented in the other posts, then speculates on what may have actually happened.

Finally! My much-delayed conclusion to my series on Mahdi Obeidi. In this post, I’ll review everything I’ve presented before (note, I’m not putting links for stuff covered earlier–if you want a particular link, ask me for it in the comments), then provide two different speculative scenarios for what might really have happened. As I’ve been saying throughout this series, I don’t think I’ve disproven the story of Mahdi Obeidi. I think his story–as told–is possible. But I do think it improbable.

I speculate below that one of two things happened with the Obeidi story. I think it possible that Obeidi had something less spectacular to turn over, and that the CIA simply fluffed up the story to serve their needs. But I also think it possible that the the CIA contacted Obeidi during the war, encouraged him to defect, had him contact Pitzer as his first intelligence contact, then made up the centrifuge and blueprint story out of thin air. If either scenario were true, it would suggest one of the Bush Administration’s biggest pieces of proof of Saddam’s ongoing intent was completely made up. But before I flesh out these scenarios, let me lay out the evidence I’ve given so far.

Summary: In this series of posts, I examine some funkiness regarding the story of Mahdi Obeidi, the Iraqi nuclear scientist who claimed to have buried a nuclear centrifuge under his rose plant. In part one, I lay out a timeline for his story. Parts two and three examine some problems with the materials he turned over. Part four questions the stories Obeidi and Pitzer told about their meeting. In this post, I look at central prop in this story, a WaPo article that provided Obeidi’s motivation for reaching out to Pitzer. The WaPo story doesn’t discredit the story, but it does raise the possibility that Chalabi’s INC was involved in this story.

When faced with the challenge of how to turn over his centrifuge to the Americans without getting arrested, Mahdi Obeidi turned to a WaPo article for inspiration. He explains he was given the Internet printout of the article by a friend. It reminded him of former weapons inspector David Albright, whom Obeidi had met and misinformed in the late 1990s. That reminder gave him the idea to reach out to David Albright to see if he could broker a meeting with the Americans.

According to Atrios’ timeline, we’ve now entered the first phase of a long process that will end in war:

Winter/Spring – The clone army of foreign policy "experts" fromconservative foreign policy outfits nobody ever heard of beforesuddenly appear on all the cable news programs all the time, frowningfuriously and expressing concerns about the "grave threat" that Iranposes. Never before heard of Iranian exile group members startappearing regularly, talking about their role in the nuclear programand talking up Iran’s human rights violations.

Which sounds about right–we may have even entered the Spring/Summer phase of the liberal hawk.

The thing is, though, we have yet to figure out why we fought the last war. It wasn’t the WMDs. It wasn’t an attempt to spread democracy. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to knock off all the dictatorships in the region like dominoes. And it has only inflamed the Islamic fundamentalists in the region.

So before we go off to launch the next war, it’s time we had a really honest discussion about why we launched the last one.