Maybe He Can Get an Endowed Chair at AEI
Apparently, "Landslide" Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress scored a whopping .36% in the recent Iraqi election. Now he's claiming that the election was fraudulent. This may put some readers of this blog in a quandary. I mean, some of you almost certainly believe that there was widespread fraud in the Dec. 15 election. But now Chalabi is saying that there was widespread fraud in the Dec. 15 election. And Chalabi, like the proverbial Cretan, is a liar. So if he says that the election suffered from widespread corruption/fraud . . . then the election was on the up-and-up?
I have to end this post before my head explodes.
posted by Number Three @ 7:47 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Emery,
Just to make your head explode more, the exact phrase is:
"Cretans are always liars" (Kretes aei pseustai) -- still in currency today because it was quoted by the Apostle Paul at Titus 1:12 and then later (much later) debated by various logicians. For if "Cretans are always liars" and Epimenides, who is from Crete, said this, then, depending on how one defines "liar", the statment is a pardox (known as Epimenides' paradox, and example of the "liar paradox"). I always wondered if Epimenides had Odysseus in mind in Books XIII-XX of the Odyssey, when the hero disguised himself as the Cretan beggar Aithon and spun out his tale of having come from Crete (known as his "Cretan Lies").
At any rate, there are certainly many paradoxes in Iraq today, one of them being Chalabi. I always thought that the charge of spying for Iran laid against him and the subsequent raiding by US forces of his house (or was it his office?) was nothing more than mere political theater, a pathetic pyroette enacted to give Chalabi the necessary credentials to run on the premise that he was independent of, and persecuted by, the US. It was also convenient for the Bush adminisration, who could make him a convenient scape goat for their pre-war intelligence lies. Looks like the Iraqis aren't as dumb as Americans.
Buon Natale e tanti auguri,
Ivy
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