Babs Lerner is Back!

(Note: This piece was in Draft Mode for more than a year before I finally got back to it and published it on April 1, 2006).

And once again, she's shillin' for Chalabi! (Note: This is a more detailed version of this post).

Let's analyze a few of her points:

(1) Chalabi is popular because he is on the winning list.
The problem with this is that we have no way of knowing who was voting for him and who was voting because of other people on the list. This is the problem with voting for lists rather than specific people; the government can be manipulated by those in charge of making the lists by putting unpopular people on a popular list (particularly when the exact composition of the list is not revealed until just before or maybe after the elections). As I recall, polls taken last year showed that Chalabi has essentially nil popular support.
It's obvious to me that the neocons are trying to manipulate the list to put Chalabi in power. They make certain that he gets on the most popular list and then claim that he is the reason that they were so popular.

This quote is a perfect example of her deception:

"The claim that Chalabi has no base of support in Iraq and no significant allies there will, likely, be put paid by the election results, and by his continuing relationships with Sistani, with the Kurds, and other Iraqi players."

Er... when no one voted specifically for Chalabi (or any other candidate, for that matter), how does the fact that people voted for a 275-candidate list on which he happened to be, prove that HE is popular?

Essentailly she is pulling a Michael Rubin; projecting her preferences onto the Iraqis.

(2) Chalabi gave us good intelligence, Gen. Myers said so.
I'll have to do some checking on that.

(3) Chalabi didn't try to lie us into war. Look, the CIA believed that there were weapons of mass destruction, so obviously we believed for other reasons.
Considering how skeptical the CIA was about the WMD claims, I think that the idea that it was the CIA who made the mistakes is ludicrous. Hack Kelly makes the same stupid claims. I don't know why George Tenet reassured Bush that the WMDs were a "slam dunk," but I have a feeling that he was put under a lot more pressure and thus was a lot more solicitous of the president than rank-and-file CIA members.

(4) Chalabi never betrayed us to Iran.
I think the explanation for why Iran used the broken code to relay the message that Chalabi had let them know the code was broken was NOT, as neocons claim, because he was a good guy and they wanted him out. I think that they recognized him for what he was, a person who was looking out only for himself (I think he'd work for the highest bidder), and they decided to take him down because they didn't trust him.

(5) The charges of bank fraud were entirely politically motivated.
I can't directly say, but I think there is just as much chance that the prince allowing him to flee from Jordan was politically motivated. We shall see, I guess.

(6) The CIA hates Chalabi because Chalabi was right about everything.
This assumes that Chalabi didn't play a role in the secuirty breach that he told the CIA about. Also, Lerner's insistence that "The CIA was contemptuous of him, and of his claim that a majority of Iraqis hated Saddam and would welcome his overthrow but, once again, the facts proved Chalabi correct" is less than totally accurate, considering that the Iraqis did not, in fact, welcome the overthrow of Saddam in the sense that they threw flowers at us and greeted us as liberators.

In short, it's more of the same ol' Babs.

That is all.