From Ahmad Chalabi to Reza Pahlavi: The politics of manufactured opposition
By Ivan Sascha Sheehan , Majid Rafizadeh washingtonexaminer Published October 30, 2026 9:00am ET In May 2004, 14 months after the invasion of Iraq , it was clear that weapons of mass destruction could no longer be cited as justification for it. An intelligence source told the Guardian , “It’s pretty clear that the Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” They were referring to Iraqi fraudster Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, which he headed. In the months before the invasion, Chalabi’s operation fed Washington repeated claims about Saddam Hussein’s purported WMD program. The claims seemed to arrive through separate channels, independently corroborating one another. In reality, they all had one source. If Iranian intelligence was involved, Tehran had helped remove its greatest regional enemy without ever needing to persuade an American to serve the clerical regime’s interests. Twenty-some years later, a similar question faces Western capitals, this time ab...
