SubscribeJust for fun, BykerSink’s collected a host of information on recent Iraq conspiracy theories, with the biggest headline going to the idea that American Nicholas Berg was beheaded by the CIA in Abu Ghraib prison. It’s time to attack these ideas in reverse and uncover their agenda.
The answer lies not in a conspiracy’s complexity (fanciful though that can be), but in the implication that without the CIA and left to their own devices, non-westerners wouldn’t think of beheading someone or flying planes into skyscrapers; without the CIA to organise them there would be no terrorists. It’s an – actually quite racist – idea that only well educated and well funded westerners are clever enough to conspire for terror. Before the CIA, conspiracy theorists blamed Jews.
Yet all along the most believable (and quite simple) conspiracy theory – Iran duped US into war – goes largely ignored. Nobody disputes that Ahmed Chalabi sold WMD intelligence to the US or that his opposition to Saddam goes back to when Saddam was a US ally and Iran offered the greatest hope of Iraqi regime change. So the idea that Chalabi would have cut ties with Iran is more fanciful than the idea that Iran would have helped him make up stuff to sell to the Americans. Perhaps the conspiracy theorists don’t go for that because it shows non-westerners thinking for themselves.
US response: Abu Ghraib becomes Camp Redemption……Not a war for idealists
