He expands on it a lot in the start of his book, but here's a very short Q&A:
Could you tell us a little bit about your experiences in Northern Iraq, working with the opposition to Saddam Hussein and the kinds of problems you had in gaining support here at home?I was in Iraq when a coup was proposed in 1995. A general, a major general, came to me and said that he had an inside group that wanted to overthrow the government. Frankly, there was no interest in Washington. I don't know why, it is not my story why there was no interest. I met somebody recently from inside the White House who said it was completely compromised, but I realized at that point that he wasn't aware of the coup, only of the diversion of the coup. There was an uprising in 1995, which was going to be a Kurdish uprising, and the hope was that once everybody started moving troops in the north, that this military group, an armored unit, would be able to surround Saddam and force him to give up. Would it have worked? I don't know. Should it have been postponed and tried later? I don't know. What happened was, although I reported this in detail on paper, I never got an answer. For some reason, people were distracted at home. Nonetheless, at that point I was left on my own. I gave them a message, from the White House, on the fourth of March, which said, ?You are on your own.? I said, ?Read it literally,? to them. ?The President of the United States says you are on your own.?
And what was their reaction?It took the wind out of their sails, but they had already committed, and the message arrived 36 hours before the coup was supposed to go down. They couldn't pull back. One Kurdish group attacked the Iraqi army and overtook three divisions. But by the ninth or tenth of March they were out of ammunition and had to retreat. I can't say if we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein or not, because we just never investigated. It was negligence.
(...)
http://www.fpa.org/topics_info2414/topics_info_show.htm?doc_id=100339----
Then there's Ahmed Chalabi's forgery & grandstanding (this is from a 2004 WP story, but I can't find the original link):
"Officials yesterday recounted an incident in early 1995 when Chalabi's name turned up in an encrypted Iranian cable reporting a purported CIA-backed plan to assassinate Saddam Hussein, then Iraq's president. The message was intercepted by U.S. intelligence and caused a major political stir in Washington.
The 1995 incident arose at a time when Chalabi was in northern Iraq, working with CIA backing against Hussein. The CIA case officer working with Chalabi at the time was Robert Baer.
Exactly who came up with the assassination idea is subject to some dispute. One U.S. official interviewed yesterday, who was familiar with the event, credited Baer with pushing the plan.
Baer has denied this. In his book "See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," published in 2001, he wrote that the plot to kill Hussein was phony, concocted by Chalabi
in hopes of enticing Iranian support for his Iraqi opposition efforts.
To prove to the Iranians he had Washington's support to go after Hussein, Chalabi forged a letter on U.S. National Security Council stationery that asked him to contact the Iranian government for help, Baer wrote. The letter said Washington had dispatched to northern Iraq an "NSC team" headed by Robert Pope, a fictitious name."
(...)
http://zfacts.com/p/152.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
