Chalabi as AWB’s nemesis

As reported in the Melbourne Age, it seems Ahmed Chalabi was behind the Australian Wheat Board monopoly investigation for kickbacks to the Hussain regime.

This is a man who was basically in cahoots with the U.S. neocon Israel Lobby (thanks Brett for the heads-up), in placing the U.S. in the same morally compromised position as Israel by occupying another country. Such compromise has now allowed Israel to escalate it’s starvation of the Palestinian people while the U.S. has no moral authority to sanction it.

At the same time, of course, Chalabi was found to have been passing on secrets to Iran, informing them that their encryption had been broken by the U.S. To top it off, the guy was wanted in Jordan for fraud in a banking scandal worth millions, escaping across the border in the boot of a car. Of course, Jordan conveniently dropped the charges once Chalabi elevated himself to be a player in Iraqi colonial politics.

Last thing I’m going to be doing is jumping to the defence of AWB or the other corporate monopolies. Monopolies are fine when they are a government body answerable and mandated to benefit the population, why should they remain so when they are privatised to become only answerable to a corporate elite?

Indeed it’s a sad indictment of the degree that Australia has all it’s eggs in one basket, that it is so reliant on primary agricultural products like wheat and sugar cane, that these industries wield political influence to allow destructive agreements with such regimes as the Hussain regime in Iraq and the “free” trade agreement with the Cheney/Bush regime in the U.S. respectively.