A few days ago on The Corner, I noted the passing of English children’s
author Anthony Buckeridge, who wrote a series of boarding-school novels
which featured two boys named Jennings and Darbishire [sic]. In his Diary
in the current (7/3/04) issue of The Spectator — not, unfortunately,
included in the online edition — Charles Moore also mourns the passing of
Buckeridge, then tells us: “Buckeridge attended Seaford College in Sussex…
Another old boy of the school is Ahmed Chalabi, the now beleagured head of
the Iraqi National Congress…”
Moore continues: “Poor Dr. Chalabi must be needing all that cheerfulness in
adversity that used to be taught by those windy cliffs. He has been subject
to a fierce campaign of black propaganda from the British and American
foreign policy elites which much of the press has repeated as if its truth
were proved. It is suggested, for example, that his intelligence misled
America into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction;
yet this error, if error it was, was accepted not only by America but also
by the United Nations and, in effect, by UNSCOM. Dr. Chalabi is also
dismissed as irrelevant because he was an exile and because he took US
government financial support. Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the newly
sovereign Iraq, is an exile who formerly worked with MI6 and the CIA, had
their financial backing and supplied intelligence about Saddam’s WMD. But
he, mysteriously, is all right. I do not know whether Dr. Chalabi is the
answer to Iraq’s problems, but if he is so negligible, why is so much effort
put into attacking him?”