Everyone is in Kuwait. And I mean everyone. I was talking to a couple ex-CIA sources today, trying to get a handle on what’s going on with the Iraqi-occupation-government-to-be. I wanted to figure out who was in and who was out, who was worth trying to get on the phone, 
and so forth. How about this ex-CIA Iraq-hand? Should I give him a call? Oh, he’s in Kuwait working for General X. That anti-Chalabi Iraqi emigre? Oh, him? In Kuwait. He’s in the mix too.
Some day, and perhaps some day in the not-too-distant future, someone will write this book. How much of the Washington foreign policy politics of the last decade got compressed into this scrum at the head of the Persian Gulf, how everyone who has a theory about what the next government of Iraq should look like, everyone who wants to make money off it — in short, the level-headed, the hopelessly idealistic and the utterly craven — all descended on Kuwait City to jockey for position.
There’s the Pentagon and the State department, the three or four different “Iraqi oppositions” the CIA has courted over the last dozen years, the NGOs, the would-be Lawrence of Arabias, the gun-runners, the gentle-minded rule-of-law mavens, the ex-Generals, the constitutional lawyers, the hotheads and the maniacs.
Everyone’s there or soon will be. And they’re all waiting at the starting line.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the Iraqis …
