Iran War: Iran-Contra scam x 100?

Manucher Ghorbanifar, chief Iranian scammer in the Iran-Contra affair, suckered the Reagan administration and many of the same players who are involved in the Iran War agitation (Ghorbanifar is still on the scene, too)

It's now widely recongized that the neocons' favorite Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi, was the lead scammer among the Iraqis in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Laura Rozen, who for years has been following the involvement of the Iran-Contra bamboozler Manucher Ghorbanifar pictured here with the Cheney-Bush foreign policy makers, now asks Has Washington found its Iranian Chalabi? Mother Jones 10/06/06. Richard Perle, one of the godfathers of the Iraq War and a Chalabi booster even after many neocons had lost enthusiasm for him, is now pushing one Abbas Fakhravar as the new go-to guy on Iranian policy. She writes:

A virtual unknown both inside and outside Iran when he arrived in the United States in May, Fakhravar has in the months since then ascended to prominence at a dizzying clip. By midsummer he was rushing from testifying on Capitol Hill one moment to an Iran opposition gathering at the White House the next, meeting regularly with policymakers and influential advisers, chatting with the former Shah’s son on his cell phone, and generally being touted as the young, idealistic face of the movement to overthrow the mullahs.

But Fakhravar may be a false messiah. In interviews with more than a dozen Iranian opposition figures, some of them former political prisoners, a different picture emerged—one of an opportunist being pushed to the fore by Iran hawks, a reputed jailhouse snitch who was locked up for nonpolitical offenses but reinvented himself as a student activist and political prisoner once behind bars. ...

For those like Perle who want the United States to eschew diplomacy in favor of backing regime change, Fakhravar is an essential link in the argument for confrontation with Iran. Rather than reminding Americans of Chalabi, who is now known to have orchestrated much of the Bush administration’s bad wmd intelligence, they’d like to summon memories of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan sought to embolden and unify dissidents in the Soviet Union. But by choosing Fakhravar, they may have inadvertently accomplished the opposite, exposing the ruptures in the pro-democracy movement and throwing into question the notion that America’s problems with Tehran will be solved by a saffron revolution.

If you like the Iraq War, you're going to really love what happens if the Cheney-Bush administration expands it to Iran. With friends and advisers like Manucher Ghorbanifar and Abbas Fakhravar, how can we go wrong?

Maybe all we really need to know about Fakkravar is his reaction to his first meeting with Perle, whose admirers nicknamed him the Prince of Darkness: "In my eyes I saw the prince of light".

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