LONDON: The Middle East, as several former spooks have stated since September 11, is hostile ground for Western intelligence agencies. For obvious reasons, Iraq is the most hostile territory of all.

Which makes it very strange is that the US government, in the shape of the State Department, is currently doing all it can to shut down the only reliable pro-Western source of intelligence on Saddam’s dictatorship; the clandestine “information collection programme” run by the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Whatever Bush may say about the ‘axis of evil’, the INC is anathema in much of Washington because it wants to replace Saddam not with another military strongman (the State Department’s preferred option) but a pluralist democracy.

I have seen the INC information network in action in several countries bordering Iraq and it is pretty impressive. Equipped with digital cameras, satellite phones and laptop encryption software, its agents run regular missions inside the country. Some of the resulting intelligence is shared with journalists, some with Western authorities — usually not the CIA, but the Defence Intelligence Agency, run by the INC’s main US allies in the Pentagon.

This work is done on not much more than a shoestring budget. Since September, the State Department has repeatedly cut the INC’s grant, approved by Congress in 1998. Last week, after yet another inspection at the INC London headquarters, US officials said further funds would be paid only if the INC stopped all intelligence-gathering immediately. They could carry on with their TV station, but spying was out.

That, says INC leader Ahmad Chalabi, is totally unacceptable. It would “disembowel” his organization, turning it into precisely the posturing, irrelevant body its US government critics frequently claim that it is.

That, supposedly, is the point. Some war on terror. Drifting and divided, the US Administration is wilfully seeking to make sure it continues to grope in the dark.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.