Asia Times Battle of the old Middle East hands

The Deep Insider battle on who will rule Iraq after Saddam. The one with the biggest backers, the pax americana neo-con's, is Chalabi, who also has great PR. The State Department, CIA, and experienced military leaders openly oppose him.

Chalabi, who hails from an aristocratic Shi'ite family, has depicted himself as an Iraqi nationalist dedicated to human rights, the rule of law and a federal structure for a future Iraq that would guarantee greater autonomy for the country's disparate regions and ethnic groups.

That image has won him significant support in the US Congress, which in 1998 approved the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), a bill that provided almost US$100 million in aid for opposition groups, particularly his INC.

But what has really given him political muscle in Washington is the enthusiastic backing he has received from a group of neo-conservatives closely identified with Israel's Likud Party and associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Rumsfeld and Cheney, charter members of the PNAC, recruited their top foreign policy aides heavily from these two groups, while the AEI's Richard Perle, who heads Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, has been friends with Chalabi for some 20 years.

This is part of the geo-political scheme to overthrow the existing Middle Eastern authoritarian governments to replace them with authoritarian but Western leaning governments.