Full Release - IRmep

~ offi;ial s~id, a fact wQh FBI sources confinned wQout additional
comment. The other is still (l working Pentagon official, federal law
enforcement officials and former CIA officials said."
Page 3 of6
Independent journalist Bob Dreyfuss, whose excellent articles on the
neocons in The American Prospect and Mother Jones puts him up there
with Jim Lobe, Michael Lind, and Joshua Marshall as a veritable maven of
neocon-ology, names names:
"The two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold
Rhode, an officzal'in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael
Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute."
Rubin, formerly of the Office of Special Plans and the CPA, who served as
liaison with Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, certainly fits the
bill. No wonder he's been so tI' cranky lately, what with FBI agents barging
into his office and giving him the third degree.
Rhode, a longtime Pentagon official assigned to the Office of Net
Assessment and a specialist on Islam, is reportedly Douglas Feith's chief
enforcer of the anti-Arab party line among the civilian Pentagon hierarchy.
In refusing to be interviewed by Dreyfuss for a piece on the neocons in
Mother Jones, Rhode's laconic reply was:
"Those who speak, pay."
Prescient words, arid truer than perhaps even Rhode realized at the time.
Hauled up before·a grand jury, however, Rhode, Rubin, and the. rest of
Chalabi's Pentagon fan club may have .no choice about speaking - especially
with the prosp~ct of a long "vacationII at a ·federal facility staring them in
the face. -
Much is being made of bow the Iranians "duped" us into invading Iraq, and
"used" the U.S. in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and "paving the way," as
Julian Borger puts it, for a Shi'ite-ruled Iraq. But a simple map of the
region- and rudimentary knowledge of the history of the past ~ecade or so
would ha~e revealed as much. As I wrote in this space over a year ago:
"In view of Iran's growing sphere of influence in Iraq, it seems rather
disingenuous to destroy the Sunni minority government run by the Ba'ath
Party and then deny any responsibility for the Shi'ite-y outcome. The U.S.
has made a gift of Iraq to Teheran, reigniting the religious passions that
overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah Reza· Pahlavi of Iran and propelled
Khomeini to power."
In charting the outlines of "phase two" of the invasion of Iraq, that same
week ,last year, I pointed out:
file:/lC:\DOCUME-l\agolwink\LOCALS....l\Temp\XN729MWP.htm 6/13/2005