From nut-job liar to presidential ear
It's nice to see that the Prez is consulting with experts on Iraq - it might have been nice to have done so before the war and all, but there you go, right? I mean Bush tried to before the war, he meant well, and it's not like it's his fault that his main man, Ahmad Chalabi turned out to be a fraud and nut-job, right? At least now he's learned his lesson and he's got fully-qualified experts from a variety of fields...Q Can you give us a readout on the President's meeting this morning with the Iraq experts?
MR. SNOW: Yes. Oh, my goodness, I forgot to bring the list. But actually -- do you have the list, Fred? Yes, it was an interesting meeting. What you ended up having was -- I've got all the names but one written down here. We had Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey, Michael Vickers, Amir Taheri, Fouad Ajami and Raad Alkadiri. And you had a combination there of military men and also scholars who are students of Iraq. And it was an interesting discussion that touched upon cultural issues, on political issues, on the state of affairs in Iraq. You had a number of people who've been there recently, General McCaffrey having returned just last month from his latest visit. Fouad Ajami last year had the occasion to sit down and speak with the Ayatollah Sistani, Ali al Sistani.The President wanted to hear about that. And what he really wanted first was to get their honest opinions -- and, again, these were honest opinions -- about how things are going in Iraq, about the status and viability of the government, and what the United States needs to do on the way forward. The one thing that was of mutual agreement is that, number one, this is an important enterprise, and number two, that we can and will win it. But those are sort of the general outlines of the conversation.
Wait a minute, let me look at that list again, Wayne Downing, Barry McCaffrey, Michael Vickers, Amir Taheri... Amir Taheri? Where do I know that name from? Oh yeah, he's one of our very own National Post's experts that fucking near caused an international incident a week ago by lying in print and duping our ever-vigilant PM.
Amir seems to have learned well from sensei Chalabi. My bet is that it won't be long that the steady drip of CIA money will be heard in the Taheri bank accounts...
