Best laid plans go astray. Imagine the slipshod ones, heavily conditioned by ideology. As das monde notes above the oil resources of the Middle East have been a matter of contention since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.

I recall one episode that illustrates a certain conceptual blindness, an ethical denial that such a major event as a war could be driven by sheer greed. In December 2001 several secret meetings were held in Rome between Americans, Iranians and Italians. The meeting was arranged by Ledeen and Ghorbanifar. According to the testimony of the then chief of the Italian secret services SISMI, Nicolò Pollari, throughout the meeting the only thing that was discussed were the oil reserves of Iraq with maps of Iraq resources all over the place. The Iranians who ran the Iraqi Shi'ite organizations presumably were striking a backdoor deal with the Americans.

Ledeen heatedly denied the scoop and declared he would sue the two authors of the story, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D'Avanzo. He asserted that the meetings were held to save American lives in Afghanistan, that Pollari could not have made similar declarations. He also asserted (correctly) that the two reporters had got the hotels' names wrong. (The meetings were actually held in a well known hotel just off Piazza Navona.)

I personally tend to see Ledeen from an Italian perspective as epitomized in the words of his long time collaborator, Francesco Pazienza. Pazienza depicted him as single-mindedly obsessed with making money.

In the end there were backdoor operations with envoys sent to Teheran to negotiate Teheran's stance. Once again, as with Reagan and Khomeini, the Iranians outwitted Cheney's backdoor boys. Rafsanjani was not elected president as many would have wished.

In 2002 the neocon crowd organized with Chalabi a big shebang in London where all the purported opposition leaders got together to arrange the future government. A good word was put in for the last king's heir. Plenty of hand shaking. Everything under control. Woolsey happy as a lark. The INC would make things smooth. There would be plenty of big bucks for everyone- and there were. Things didn't quite go as planned- or did they? The bottom line is that a clique of backdoor boys paying lip service to a shoddy ideology made fortunes.