Iraqi officials are howling about Bob Woodward's new book like Captain Renault in Casablanca: They are shocked that the CIA has been spying on them.
What a hoot.
Maybe here, some Americans will truly be shocked, of course, and outraged.
Attention, K-Mart shoppers: Iraq is in the Middle East.
The Baghdad government is an Iranian Trojan Horse, bulging with Tehran agents, including, perhaps, the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself.
His government is a viper's nest of intrigue, as befits a remnant of the Byzantine Empire. It owes its existence to Iran and Syria.
"The prime minister spent long years of exile in Syria and his most important ally in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq," notes the respected British military journalist, Patrick Coburn, "which was founded on Iran's initiative in Tehran in 1982."
They're used to spies.
"They will be used to Syrian and Iranian security monitoring their activities," Cockburn observes.
But he makes a more salient point.
"Overall, the extent of U.S. surveillance of its Shia and Kurdish allies in Iraq reveals a deep anxiety in Washington that, in supporting a government in Baghdad dominated by Shia Islamic parties, it has promoted a government that is closer to Iran than the U.S."
So of course we're spying on them!
The only surprise is whether it's true, as Woodward alleges, that the CIA has been proficient enough to plant spies -- and eavsdropping technology -- amid the prime minister's inner circle.
To date, most accounts from intelligence sources and former CIA officers who have served in Baghdad paint the agency's spy operations there as extremely limited.
Not that here's anything remotely new about spying on friends: Intelligence services are always playing double games with their friends.
Indeed, the 9/11 Commission recommended the CIA do more "unilateral" operations.
U.S. intelligence operates on three basic planes on the territories of our allies and friends.
On one level, we work closely "in liaison" with the host government's intelligence services against a common target like, say, al Qaeda or Russian and Chinese spies.
On another, we conduct operations against such enemies without our host's involvement or, sometimes, knowledge.
On a third plane, we conduct espionage operations against our friends, in multiple permutations.
It was ever thus, from the beginning of time, in "the birthplace of civilization," one can assume, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, today known as Iraq.
As the prominent Indian foreign policy journalist B. Raman wrote a few years ago:
"All intelligence agencies undertake penetration operations in other countries -- whether friend or foe -- for intelligence collection. Even while posing as India's strategic partner, the USA's CIA penetrated the Intelligence Bureau, the Reasearch and Analysis Wing and the National Security Council Secretariat, NSCS."
Still, Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, lamented what Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, had said about the CIA.
"If it is true, it reflects that there is no trust and it reflects also that the institutions in the United States are used to spying on their friends and their enemies in the same way," al-Dabbagh, said in a prepared statement. "We will raise this with the American side and we will ask for an explanation."
I'd like to be in that meeting.
Woodward's allegations are made in his fourth book about the Bush administration, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008," which is scheduled to be released Monday, following a special segment, of course, on 60 Minutes.
Meanwhile, John McCain's got to be shocked at seeing the interview he gave Woodward end up in cold type.
"Everything is f---ing spin,'" he said of the Bush White House's handling of the war, according to Woodward.
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