An all together too wickedly a delicious story to believe; Iranians leading the Americans by the nose into invading Iraq.

And now Washington has launched an urgent probe into the probability that Iran really did so by passing bogus intelligence through the Iraqi National Congress (INC), according to UK's Guardian publication (May 25).

The man who allegedly clipped on the nose-ring was the Pentagon's favourite Ahmad Chalabi, of the Iraqi Governing Council, now disgraced for allegedly selling US secrets to Iran. The Iranians apparently sold the weapons of mass destruction mirage to the Republic Party's neo-conservatives (neo-cons) through Chalabi and the INC.

Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the White House and the Pentagon to get rid of their arch enemy, Saddam Hussein, to pave the way for a Shiite-ruled Iraq.

According to an US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Teheran; and Habib had been a paid Iranian agent for several years, passing intelligence in both directions.

Bad blood

Chalabi has dismissed the allegations as fabrications and an attempt by the CIA to smear his name but the latter continues to stand by its charges. According to the report there has been bad blood between the agency and Chalabi for more than eight years.

The CIA has asked the FBI to investigate the former Iraqi exile's contacts in the Pentagon to unearth how the INC acquired sensitive information that ended up in Iranian hands, the Guardian said.

Apparently the CIA confirmed long held suspicions when a piece of "sensitive compartmented information" was discovered in the hands of the Iranians when its transmission was intercepted by the National Security Agency. This information was restricted to only a select few.

And it was tracked right back to the Iranians through Habib, a Shiite Kurd. Habib ran a Pentagon-funded intelligence collection programme prior to the invasion and put US officials in touch with Iraqi defectors who made the claims about Saddam's WMD.

It was these defectors' claims that helped make the case for war but have since proved groundless, the Guardian said.

"By calling for an FBI counter-intelligence investigations, the CIA, is in effect, threatening to disgrace senior neo-conservatives in the Pentagon," it added.

How could hard-bitten men of the world like Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who is the very public face of all that is ugly in America, be so gullible?

Supreme confidence in awesome military superiority, the heightened level of paranoia in the US and the neo-cons' sense of missionary zeal must've played into the hands of the Iranians. Images of an American version of democracy flowering in the Middle-East and American soldiers hailed as liberating heroes as they rolled through Iraq too proved too tempting bait.

The Guardian quoted a Washington intelligence source as saying: "It's pretty clear that the Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi."

Masterful operation

Larry Johnson, a former senior counter-terrorist official at the State Department was quoted as saying: "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

Add into this mixture the recent history of the mauling the American intelligence services received from Congressional hearings on the events leading up to the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and the long knives are bound to be out.

However, the most griping part of the unfolding chaotic drama is how the forces of history have converged to find bloody expression in Iraq - let loose by the hasty Americanled invasion.

A brief background at this juncture would be in order. In 1953, at the instigation of the British the CIA organised the toppling of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Dr Mohammad Mossadeq.

They then installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah (king of kings) whose secret police, the Savak savagely oppressed the population as he forcibly modernised the state.

This provoked a popular uprising which led to the ruler's downfall and the return of the firebrand cleric Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 from exile in France, and Shiite clerics with undying hatred for the US took power.

Where Iraq is concerned, again the CIA's hand was at work. Saddam was the tool to get rid of the then military dictator Gen Abdel Karim Kassem who tolerated the existence of communists within the country.

When the first attempt failed in 1959, the CIA squirreled Saddam away in Cairo, Egypt. The second in 1963 succeeded and Saddam took the place of Abdel. The CIA then gave him a long list of the names of Iraqi communists who he summarily executed.

Then in 1980 the US gave the nod to Saddam to wage war against Iran. In that eight-year period, America delivered battlefield intelligence, food, loans, dual use technologies and cluster bombs to Iraq.

The romance with Saddam came to end with the American media's intense coverage of his human rights abuse and strident criticism of the present president' father, George H.W. Bush's administration's cosy relations with the Iraqi dictator.

Final straw

The final straw for Saddam came when, despite siphoning oil from their common oilfield, Kuwait demanded settlement for the loans he took during the Iraq-Iran war. It's also been widely publicised that Cheney when he was defence secretary during the first Bush's presidency, doctored satellite pictures to show Iraqi forces mobilising along the borders of Saudi Arabia to scare that country into underwriting the war to evict Saddam from Kuwait.

In Afghanistan in the 1970s, the US gave aid and comfort to the al-Qaeda, including training and weapons to fight the Soviet occupiers. And the leader of that group was the young Osama bin Laden.

Now all the decades of lies, deceptions and prevarications have come home to roost in Iraq where the US has unwittingly opened a new training ground for terrorists of all shades.

In the unbelievable mess that is Iraq the Americans are being kept completely off-balance with no real lasting solution to the nearly daily violence and the continued uncertainty. The establishment of the interim Iraqi government is no answer either for it's considered an America's puppet by the local populace.

The US desperately wants out and at the same time save face while withdrawing without the accompanying ignominy; leaving behind a friendly government. For the shadow of Vietnam has always been hovering this war zone.

But, conflicting forces are still struggling to strike a balance in Iraq and it's anybody's guess when that'll happen. Even when that takes place most Iraqis would have little love for the US. They promised much and delivered less.

Yet, those responsible for this horrendous period in the opening chapters of the 21st century are still clinging to the fiction that what they did was just, shying away from the fact that they are ultimately responsible for the meaningless deaths of thousands and tremendous destruction wrought by this dishonorable war.

The depth of Washington's moral cowardice is still being measured. And over the whole shameful affair looms America's spine-chilling and ballooning US$37 trillion national debt with grave implications for the rest of the world.

In Teheran, part of Bush's axis of evil, they must be savouring the sight of the superpower reeling like a punch-drunk boxer; brains had prevailed over brawn.