Iran's American Foreign Policy

Overlooked in most of the commentary on Bush's and Rumsfeld's recent attempts to regain the upper hand politically on the war and security is this bit of information about the Senate report:

One of the reports by the committee criticized a decision by the National Security Council in 2002 to maintain a close relationship with the Iraqi National Congress, headed by the exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, even after the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency had warned that "the I.N.C was penetrated by hostile intelligence services," notably Iran.

The report concluded that the organization had provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, and concluded that the group "attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists."

Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, of course, deny any significance to the Iraqi National Congress' role in the buildup to the war. Now, we've known that Chalabi and pals have been a conduit for false information manipulated by the administration in its own service. We have also known about Chalabi's communications with Iran. But there's an even more disturbing question here: has Iran, via the INC, determined the US's disastrous foreign policy in Iraq?

We know, for instance, that Ahmadinejad is a clever man - crazy rhetoric, of course, but quite clever at foreign affairs. And we know, for instance, that we have quintessentially unclever people running US foreign policy (unless they're actually cynical anarchists). It is quite possible that the American invasion of Iraq was managed at least partially by Iran.

Here's Juan Cole doing the same speculating:

Intriguingly, the report says that the Defense Intelligence Agency warned the Pentagon off the INC on the grounds that it had been penetrated by a foreign intelligence agency, which might be using it to play the US.

The foreign country that had penetrated Chalabi's group? Iran.

What is really delicious is that it suggests that the influential Neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute who ceaselessly promoted Chalabi, like Richard Perle, David Rhode, and Michael Rubin, were duped by Tehran into doing its bidding.