November 5, 2006
Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi
By DEXTER FILKINS
1. London, August 2006
Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way.
The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children.
The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began.
For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards.
But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster.
“The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.”
Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now.
“We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.”
Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists).
In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.
“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”
It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.
“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’
“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”
Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native.
“I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.”
And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi?
Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq?
2. Mushkhab, January 2005
The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want.
We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long.
The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast.
An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans.
The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest.
“Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.”
Everyone laughs.
We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone.
“My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.”
He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him.
“On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.”
Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret.
It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink.
Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf.
By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon.
Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street.
More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase.
It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day.
The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head.
“Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.”
No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became.
In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him.
On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come.
Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining.
“The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.”
Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East.
It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort.
For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer.
But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him.
“Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.”
3. Baghdad, October 2005
Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari.
Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq.
Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market.
“Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.”
Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie.
On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate.
“Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.”
Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003.
Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein.
Dexter Filkins
The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall.
For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.”
One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.”
Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist.
Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would.
The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true.
“For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.”
So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway.
A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice.
One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out.
“Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.”
4. Washington, November 2005
The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten.
Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister.
Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming.
“This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps.
Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.”
By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco.
“Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.”
Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said.
As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries.
“He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch.
The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.”
Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement.
“There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi.
Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?”
There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government.
“I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ”
A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.”
Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq.
Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him.
It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi %26amp; Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade.
“In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says.
This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me.
One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein.
“We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?”
Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi.
“I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.”
Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs.
“It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says.
But the story doesn’t end there.
A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.)
Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks.
David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it.
“In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.”
Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.”
Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said.
Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources.
“We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.”
Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.”
Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear?
“I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.”
5. Tehran, November 2005
Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran.
The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does.
“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.”
Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.
“Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.”
Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries.
In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world.
An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared.
More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks.
Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser.
I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.”
Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room.
At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together.
As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless.
Chalabi played it cool.
“The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad.
Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.”
For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art?
So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves.
“Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands.
We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro.
“Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.”
A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind.
For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men.
“It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes.
Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact.
Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear.
6. Baghdad, December 2005
A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes.
As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask.
“Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English.
Whom are you going to vote for?
“The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.”
When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.
But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street.
The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate.
Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election.
He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate.
As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots.
But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war.
Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end.
Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer.
7. London, August 2006
The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own.
He doesn’t hesitate to answer.
“Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”
Plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.?
I really thought about helping you out here, just because it would be fun to write. Then I looked at your profile and see that:
1. You answer other people's questions so obviously without care and thought and apparently just for points so you can go ask more questions.
and
2. The people that are gracious enough to assist you or answer your questions most of the time don't even recieve the courtesy of you selecting the "best answer" but they are instead selected by voters.
So instead I decide that if you are not interested in doing the right, then why in the world should anyone be interested in helping you?
Reply:So this is a "do my homework" question? Report It
Reply:i agree with stymie :) Report It
Reply:nicely done Report It
Reply:Yep, quite agree Report It
Reply:You can never underestimate the USA and the lenghtd they will go to to save a dime on a gallon of crude.there were no WMD's and if there were, they were planted by the U.S Report It
Reply:wow..go stymie! lol Report It
Reply:thats wayyy to long like what do u want from us? that will take forever!!!!!!!!! Report It
Reply:The main idea should look like this and I do not have a monopoly on this heading
'Lies and Liers who Lie them' Report It
peach
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Does Anyone Else Have This Problem With Staffing Agencies ?
I have lived in different states over the years and have found this general attitude from agencies to be universal. I was under the impression that staffing agencies (temp agencies) services are to be utilized in the event if a person is between jobs, waiting to get an interview with for a permanent job or trying to gain experience in the workforce. The problem is everytime I call different agencies its the same story, "Email us your resume and if its a good fit with what our client wants, we'll send you some testing." After contacting them then its, "Your test scores were great, we'll call you no need to call us back as we have a high volume of calls coming in." Or when calling around asking if there is work available the agents have nasty attitudes and treat you like you are worth nothing more than the dirt on the bottom of their shoe. When are these staffing agents going to realize that if it weren't for people looking for work they would NOT have jobs? They should be eliminated.
Does Anyone Else Have This Problem With Staffing Agencies ?
I most definately agree. What I enjoy doing is turning the tables on them and asking them what they can do for me? I've also noticed that looking for a permanet placement through them can be difficult because of their HIGH priced buy out fees that are non-negociable. I can't tell you the number of possibilites I've lost because of that. AND they screw you over with unemployment if you're in between assignments... they take it to the utmost appeals court just to avoid paying you.... but if your willing to stick it out and fight you can get something in the end. Placement agencies are of the devil and belong in hell.
Reply:I found it to be 75/25!
75% of the time I came across bad staffing agencies that did not have a high clientele (relationships with employers). They treated everyone bad with blank promises. I also noticed when there are too many agencies in a town/city, there aren't enough jobs to go around either.
25% are reputable and have a good clientele. These are the ones that place you with fairly good employers. I can very honestly say that one of them got me placed with an excellent major bank. I am in permanently and have had promotions. I have no regrets. When I answer questions on this site I always emphasize that there are bad ones and good ones. Unfortunately, you really have to screen them yourself. (I agree with you that things should not be that way).
Reply:The people who pay (IE: employers) the staffing company make the criteria. They usually want fairly qualified people to justify paying the staffing agency.
Reply:I'm a temp and my agency is lovely. I think because it's a smaller organization, more of a boutique word-of-mouth kind of thing. I asked around and heard good things about this agency, and I've been with them on and off for five years. I also check in often and inquire about assignments, and follow up when necessary. Persistence goes a long way.
Reply:I HATE staffing companies. We have to use periodically where I work, but only for very menial jobs that last less than a week, and usually only one to two days.
I would never use them for anything more critical to our business and I've been handling HR here for nearly 10 years.
Reply:I agree with you as well. I notice temp agencies tell allot of fibs just to keep you hanging on. They try to tell you the company of your dreams is going to be available and if you can work the temp jobs until your dream job is ready for you. Well how long can you hold your breath? I wished I could find a true employment agency as where I come from, the employment agencies really do have the jobs they are posting an ad on. Here in Florida the jobs posted are not real. They just want you to bite the bait like a fish on a hook.
Does Anyone Else Have This Problem With Staffing Agencies ?
I most definately agree. What I enjoy doing is turning the tables on them and asking them what they can do for me? I've also noticed that looking for a permanet placement through them can be difficult because of their HIGH priced buy out fees that are non-negociable. I can't tell you the number of possibilites I've lost because of that. AND they screw you over with unemployment if you're in between assignments... they take it to the utmost appeals court just to avoid paying you.... but if your willing to stick it out and fight you can get something in the end. Placement agencies are of the devil and belong in hell.
Reply:I found it to be 75/25!
75% of the time I came across bad staffing agencies that did not have a high clientele (relationships with employers). They treated everyone bad with blank promises. I also noticed when there are too many agencies in a town/city, there aren't enough jobs to go around either.
25% are reputable and have a good clientele. These are the ones that place you with fairly good employers. I can very honestly say that one of them got me placed with an excellent major bank. I am in permanently and have had promotions. I have no regrets. When I answer questions on this site I always emphasize that there are bad ones and good ones. Unfortunately, you really have to screen them yourself. (I agree with you that things should not be that way).
Reply:The people who pay (IE: employers) the staffing company make the criteria. They usually want fairly qualified people to justify paying the staffing agency.
Reply:I'm a temp and my agency is lovely. I think because it's a smaller organization, more of a boutique word-of-mouth kind of thing. I asked around and heard good things about this agency, and I've been with them on and off for five years. I also check in often and inquire about assignments, and follow up when necessary. Persistence goes a long way.
Reply:I HATE staffing companies. We have to use periodically where I work, but only for very menial jobs that last less than a week, and usually only one to two days.
I would never use them for anything more critical to our business and I've been handling HR here for nearly 10 years.
Reply:I agree with you as well. I notice temp agencies tell allot of fibs just to keep you hanging on. They try to tell you the company of your dreams is going to be available and if you can work the temp jobs until your dream job is ready for you. Well how long can you hold your breath? I wished I could find a true employment agency as where I come from, the employment agencies really do have the jobs they are posting an ad on. Here in Florida the jobs posted are not real. They just want you to bite the bait like a fish on a hook.
Name the man that held these jobs?
Shoe Salesman
Kelly's agent
Garbage Man
Fast Food Employee
Department Store Santa
Gas Station Attendant
Male Erotic Dancer at a Women's Bar
Founder of NO MA'AM
Security Guard of Polk High
NO MA'AM President
Calendar model
Policeman on COPS
National Guardsman
Hotel Bellhop
Can Man
Name the man that held these jobs?
good old Al Bundy!!!
Reply:Al Bundy
Reply:Al Bundy of course, Duh
Reply:AL BUNDY
Reply:al bundy
Reply:That would be Al Bundy, my husband's hero! He loves Al 'cause he's B-B-B-B-B-Bad To The Bone! LOL!
Reply:i think al bundy
Reply:Al Bundy...
Reply:Al Bundi on that show Married With Children
Kelly's agent
Garbage Man
Fast Food Employee
Department Store Santa
Gas Station Attendant
Male Erotic Dancer at a Women's Bar
Founder of NO MA'AM
Security Guard of Polk High
NO MA'AM President
Calendar model
Policeman on COPS
National Guardsman
Hotel Bellhop
Can Man
Name the man that held these jobs?
good old Al Bundy!!!
Reply:Al Bundy
Reply:Al Bundy of course, Duh
Reply:AL BUNDY
Reply:al bundy
Reply:That would be Al Bundy, my husband's hero! He loves Al 'cause he's B-B-B-B-B-Bad To The Bone! LOL!
Reply:i think al bundy
Reply:Al Bundy...
Reply:Al Bundi on that show Married With Children
Is it getting tougher to trespass into America?
Guard makes border breachings tougherBy BARBARA BARRETT
McClatchy Newspapers
LAS CRUCES SUN-NEWS/NORM DETTLAFF VIA AP
Army National Guard Spc. Gustavo Gutierrez, 23, of Las Cruces, N.M., scans the U.S./Mexico border from the top of Radar Hill, near Columbus in southwestern New Mexico. He is part of Operation Jump Start.
More photosLOS ALGODONES, Mexico -- Not five minutes after the boatload of migrants slipped across the Colorado River at dusk, the "dogcatchers" arrived.
First came U.S. Border Patrol trucks, tearing down a dirt road and cutting their headlights. Then the helicopter with its deafening blades, dipping and circling, casting spotlights across the water and the mountainside, again and again and again.
On the Mexican side, above the town of Los Algodones, Francisco Lopez watched and listened. For a month, he said, he's been waiting. He sleeps under the shade of trees, scrounges food. Three times he almost crossed.
"They're here day and night," said Lopez, 42, who traveled from the state of Michoacan, hoping to reach New York. "When I got here, I was surprised to see so much force on the other side."
The show of force now includes Operation Jump Start, which President Bush announced in May. About 6,000 National Guard troops are coming to the border, to reinforce the Border Patrol "perreras": dogcatchers.
The deployment is meant to discourage migrants from risking the dash into the United States. The increased security is pushing them into remote areas -- including harsh desert and mountains -- forcing more to use smugglers and leading those who are caught to make repeated attempts that sap their strength and money. Many walk for days with little food or water.
"Short term, you might see more deaths, because they think they can beat the system," said Lt. Col. Randy Powell, the commander of the North Carolina National Guard's 252nd Combined Arms Battalion. Over time, he said, the death toll should drop.
The Guard is coming
Word has spread throughout Mexico: The Guard is coming.
"I read the newspapers," said Hector Encinas, 29, who lives in San Luis Rio Colorado, just south of San Luis, Ariz. He used to cross routinely to work in the United States, paying $300 a trip. Now the price is $1,500. He used to help others, but no more.
"It's more hard right now," Encinas said, standing in the shade near an opening in the border wall where three Border Patrol trucks were parked. "They got a fence, more soldiers, more Border Patrol."
Of the Guard, he said, "They're cool. They're cool." He knows the troops aren't allowed to make apprehensions, just to call in border agents.
Still, in the more urban Mexican crossing points south of Arizona, something has changed.
In Los Algodones, tucked into the crook of the border with California and Yuma, Ariz., the travelers who hope to sneak across the border -- known as "pollos," or chickens -- gather at dusk in the park.
Fabiola Salazar, 25, figures the smugglers the locals call "polleros" -- chicken herders -- make up 30 percent of the summer business at her family's grocery. Every morning, the smugglers buy water and food for the journey.
Lately, she said, business is way down.
Dangerous detours
What sends migrants farther out are the images of the National Guard standing watch. The North Carolina Guard troops are scattered in strategic spots along the western half of the Arizona border, including some posts so distant they're best reached by helicopter.
Near San Luis, Ariz., the troops work under camouflage nets, setting up observation points every quarter-mile on a levee near the Colorado River, above stretches of dirt and fields of tall, swaying grasses.
The scrutiny is pushing migrants toward a land so vast that travelers can walk three days before crossing a paved road. During heat like last week's, with temperatures climbing toward 115 degrees, the migrants can't carry enough water.
The Sonoran Desert is littered with their castoffs: empty water bottles, shoes, jackets. The daytime heat is blistering, and only a very brave man would walk the rugged landscape at night, said the Rev. Robin Hoover, the founder of Tucson-based Humane Borders Inc.
Yet people get through. About 60 miles north of the border lay evidence that Hoover thought came from a recent smugglers' pickup: Two dozen backpacks were discarded among the cactuses. Some held deodorant or unopened tuna cans; Hoover unfolded a scrap of paper with a Florida hotel phone number scrawled across it.
Because more men are staying in the United States, more are sending for their families. More women and children are crossing.
Migrants pass through the cotton and alfalfa fields around Rebeca Moreno's store, a quarter-mile from the Colorado River, ignoring the signs warning "Peligroso!" -- danger. Pointing across the cotton field, she said in Spanish: "There is the river. The migrants try to swim across."
They're caught, sent home and try again.
A man died right there, she said, pointing to a spot in the dirt road.
Is it getting tougher to trespass into America?
We can ONLY PRAY it keeps getting tougher and tougher every day.
Reply:Yes it is getting more difficult. This is a great article, thank you.
It should be even more difficult to get here illegally and am glad our borders are more secure now days.
Reply:I'm glad it's getting harder. That makes me happy.
Reply:Yep
Reply:My heart weeps for those who have died somebody tell them to please stop trying to cross illegally and for those who have already crossed please let them stay I am one of the NG's that guard the borders and that is how I feel
Mi corazón llora para los que han muerto a alguien les digan que
satisfacer la parada que intenta cruzarse ilegal y para los que se han cruzado ya por favor déjelos permanecerme son una del NG que guarden las fronteras y que sean cómo me siento
Reply:Thanks for posting ... good article ... we need more news like this ... :)
Reply:To the rest of the world this preoccupation with the 'illegals' issue quite amusing. Keep it up. The expressions of hate and the threats of violence are revealing
Reply:Yes it is getting tougher
McClatchy Newspapers
LAS CRUCES SUN-NEWS/NORM DETTLAFF VIA AP
Army National Guard Spc. Gustavo Gutierrez, 23, of Las Cruces, N.M., scans the U.S./Mexico border from the top of Radar Hill, near Columbus in southwestern New Mexico. He is part of Operation Jump Start.
More photosLOS ALGODONES, Mexico -- Not five minutes after the boatload of migrants slipped across the Colorado River at dusk, the "dogcatchers" arrived.
First came U.S. Border Patrol trucks, tearing down a dirt road and cutting their headlights. Then the helicopter with its deafening blades, dipping and circling, casting spotlights across the water and the mountainside, again and again and again.
On the Mexican side, above the town of Los Algodones, Francisco Lopez watched and listened. For a month, he said, he's been waiting. He sleeps under the shade of trees, scrounges food. Three times he almost crossed.
"They're here day and night," said Lopez, 42, who traveled from the state of Michoacan, hoping to reach New York. "When I got here, I was surprised to see so much force on the other side."
The show of force now includes Operation Jump Start, which President Bush announced in May. About 6,000 National Guard troops are coming to the border, to reinforce the Border Patrol "perreras": dogcatchers.
The deployment is meant to discourage migrants from risking the dash into the United States. The increased security is pushing them into remote areas -- including harsh desert and mountains -- forcing more to use smugglers and leading those who are caught to make repeated attempts that sap their strength and money. Many walk for days with little food or water.
"Short term, you might see more deaths, because they think they can beat the system," said Lt. Col. Randy Powell, the commander of the North Carolina National Guard's 252nd Combined Arms Battalion. Over time, he said, the death toll should drop.
The Guard is coming
Word has spread throughout Mexico: The Guard is coming.
"I read the newspapers," said Hector Encinas, 29, who lives in San Luis Rio Colorado, just south of San Luis, Ariz. He used to cross routinely to work in the United States, paying $300 a trip. Now the price is $1,500. He used to help others, but no more.
"It's more hard right now," Encinas said, standing in the shade near an opening in the border wall where three Border Patrol trucks were parked. "They got a fence, more soldiers, more Border Patrol."
Of the Guard, he said, "They're cool. They're cool." He knows the troops aren't allowed to make apprehensions, just to call in border agents.
Still, in the more urban Mexican crossing points south of Arizona, something has changed.
In Los Algodones, tucked into the crook of the border with California and Yuma, Ariz., the travelers who hope to sneak across the border -- known as "pollos," or chickens -- gather at dusk in the park.
Fabiola Salazar, 25, figures the smugglers the locals call "polleros" -- chicken herders -- make up 30 percent of the summer business at her family's grocery. Every morning, the smugglers buy water and food for the journey.
Lately, she said, business is way down.
Dangerous detours
What sends migrants farther out are the images of the National Guard standing watch. The North Carolina Guard troops are scattered in strategic spots along the western half of the Arizona border, including some posts so distant they're best reached by helicopter.
Near San Luis, Ariz., the troops work under camouflage nets, setting up observation points every quarter-mile on a levee near the Colorado River, above stretches of dirt and fields of tall, swaying grasses.
The scrutiny is pushing migrants toward a land so vast that travelers can walk three days before crossing a paved road. During heat like last week's, with temperatures climbing toward 115 degrees, the migrants can't carry enough water.
The Sonoran Desert is littered with their castoffs: empty water bottles, shoes, jackets. The daytime heat is blistering, and only a very brave man would walk the rugged landscape at night, said the Rev. Robin Hoover, the founder of Tucson-based Humane Borders Inc.
Yet people get through. About 60 miles north of the border lay evidence that Hoover thought came from a recent smugglers' pickup: Two dozen backpacks were discarded among the cactuses. Some held deodorant or unopened tuna cans; Hoover unfolded a scrap of paper with a Florida hotel phone number scrawled across it.
Because more men are staying in the United States, more are sending for their families. More women and children are crossing.
Migrants pass through the cotton and alfalfa fields around Rebeca Moreno's store, a quarter-mile from the Colorado River, ignoring the signs warning "Peligroso!" -- danger. Pointing across the cotton field, she said in Spanish: "There is the river. The migrants try to swim across."
They're caught, sent home and try again.
A man died right there, she said, pointing to a spot in the dirt road.
Is it getting tougher to trespass into America?
We can ONLY PRAY it keeps getting tougher and tougher every day.
Reply:Yes it is getting more difficult. This is a great article, thank you.
It should be even more difficult to get here illegally and am glad our borders are more secure now days.
Reply:I'm glad it's getting harder. That makes me happy.
Reply:Yep
Reply:My heart weeps for those who have died somebody tell them to please stop trying to cross illegally and for those who have already crossed please let them stay I am one of the NG's that guard the borders and that is how I feel
Mi corazón llora para los que han muerto a alguien les digan que
satisfacer la parada que intenta cruzarse ilegal y para los que se han cruzado ya por favor déjelos permanecerme son una del NG que guarden las fronteras y que sean cómo me siento
Reply:Thanks for posting ... good article ... we need more news like this ... :)
Reply:To the rest of the world this preoccupation with the 'illegals' issue quite amusing. Keep it up. The expressions of hate and the threats of violence are revealing
Reply:Yes it is getting tougher
What category do BHS, 'a betting agent,' 'Holland and Barrat', superdrug, and M&s come into? im american
and these names are foreign to me. What category would these shops fall into?
A Major shopping units
B Clothing and Shoe Shops
C Convenience shops
D Furniture and Carpets
E Specialist shops
F Personal services
G Catering and entertainment
H Car Sales
J Professional services and offices
K Public buildings
L Transport
M Change
N Residential
P Industrial
Q Discount stores
R Charity
What category do BHS, 'a betting agent,' 'Holland and Barrat', superdrug, and M%26amp;s come into? im american
BHS (Department store)- A
Betting Agent (you probably mean a betting shop) E
Holland %26amp; Barrett (Health foods) Probably E
Superdrug ( Walgreens without the dispensary) E
M %26amp; S (Marks %26amp; Spencer) A
All these are open to interpretation and US categorisation of businesses is a little different to the UK
Reply:BHS (British Home Stores) is a department store selling clothes / underwear / shoes / home things so I guess A.
A betting agent is a bookmaker for gambling on horses etc. so would be none of the above as they don't have gambling as an option so I guess you'd have to choose G - catering and entertainment as it's about the only entertainment most of the unemployed men round here get!
Holland and Barratt is a health store selling vitamins and health foods but again they don't have food or supplements listed so would have to be E - specialist shops.
Superdrug is a pharmacy / beauty / drugstore but they don't have an option for that either so have to be E again.
M%26amp;S (marks and spencer) is a department store selling clothes / food / shoes / homewares / toys / underwear etc. but mainly only their own brand name. - Would have to be A again.
Just out of curiosity what on earth would go under "M Change" what is a change shop? Is it when you walk in you think it's a butcher but it changes to a florist?
Reply:I suppose BHS is A, its like a department store.
Betting agent not sure on from your list
Holland and Barret is Health food so i guess E
Superdrug is a pharmacist/drug store and M%26amp;S another department store.
Reply:BHS (British Home Stores) is B
A betting agent is E I would say
Holland %26amp; Barret sell health foods so I'd say E
Superdrug sells health %26amp; beauty products so E
M%26amp;S (Marks %26amp; Spencers) is A
Reply:A mainly, BHS is British Home Stores a clothing and home furnishings store (not really major any longer I have only seen one in recent years), A betting agent is a place where you can go and place bets on sporting events and buy lottery tickets etc (there is one of these on pretty much every high street, Holland %26amp; Barrat is a wholefood and health food store selling stuff like herbal remedies, vitamins and natural foods like seeds, nuts etc, Superdrug is a pharmacy that mainly specializes in cosmetics and hair styling supplies alongside the normal pharmacy stuff and Marks %26amp; Spencer is a major retailer (probably the most prestigious chain of markets in the country) that sells mainly expensive well produced preprepared food and high quality clothes.
wallflower
A Major shopping units
B Clothing and Shoe Shops
C Convenience shops
D Furniture and Carpets
E Specialist shops
F Personal services
G Catering and entertainment
H Car Sales
J Professional services and offices
K Public buildings
L Transport
M Change
N Residential
P Industrial
Q Discount stores
R Charity
What category do BHS, 'a betting agent,' 'Holland and Barrat', superdrug, and M%26amp;s come into? im american
BHS (Department store)- A
Betting Agent (you probably mean a betting shop) E
Holland %26amp; Barrett (Health foods) Probably E
Superdrug ( Walgreens without the dispensary) E
M %26amp; S (Marks %26amp; Spencer) A
All these are open to interpretation and US categorisation of businesses is a little different to the UK
Reply:BHS (British Home Stores) is a department store selling clothes / underwear / shoes / home things so I guess A.
A betting agent is a bookmaker for gambling on horses etc. so would be none of the above as they don't have gambling as an option so I guess you'd have to choose G - catering and entertainment as it's about the only entertainment most of the unemployed men round here get!
Holland and Barratt is a health store selling vitamins and health foods but again they don't have food or supplements listed so would have to be E - specialist shops.
Superdrug is a pharmacy / beauty / drugstore but they don't have an option for that either so have to be E again.
M%26amp;S (marks and spencer) is a department store selling clothes / food / shoes / homewares / toys / underwear etc. but mainly only their own brand name. - Would have to be A again.
Just out of curiosity what on earth would go under "M Change" what is a change shop? Is it when you walk in you think it's a butcher but it changes to a florist?
Reply:I suppose BHS is A, its like a department store.
Betting agent not sure on from your list
Holland and Barret is Health food so i guess E
Superdrug is a pharmacist/drug store and M%26amp;S another department store.
Reply:BHS (British Home Stores) is B
A betting agent is E I would say
Holland %26amp; Barret sell health foods so I'd say E
Superdrug sells health %26amp; beauty products so E
M%26amp;S (Marks %26amp; Spencers) is A
Reply:A mainly, BHS is British Home Stores a clothing and home furnishings store (not really major any longer I have only seen one in recent years), A betting agent is a place where you can go and place bets on sporting events and buy lottery tickets etc (there is one of these on pretty much every high street, Holland %26amp; Barrat is a wholefood and health food store selling stuff like herbal remedies, vitamins and natural foods like seeds, nuts etc, Superdrug is a pharmacy that mainly specializes in cosmetics and hair styling supplies alongside the normal pharmacy stuff and Marks %26amp; Spencer is a major retailer (probably the most prestigious chain of markets in the country) that sells mainly expensive well produced preprepared food and high quality clothes.
wallflower
What is your zodiac sign? Does any of this describe you?
Aries
Aries have ramlike eyebrows and smug expressions. They should not be quite so smug because they are constantly clunking themselves in the skull. Cat Stevens' "Hard Headed Woman" was probably an Aries. Aries rarely say one thing and do another. They usually do the wrong thing and don't discuss it. Never point this out to an Aries unless you want your kidneys pulled out through your sinuses. Aries folks love Pisceans because Pisces people make them feel well-grounded. Aries love to laugh at the funny moon-people who suck their thumbs at age 35. Aries use guns to describe philosophical concepts. Whether you live in a palatial estate or a cardboard tepee, you will insist until death that it is exactly what you always wanted. Most Aries were concrete parking bumpers in at least two of their past lives. Aries are never born.
They skip gaily from their mothers' wombs. This may even involve rollerblades. The Aries makes life decisions as a toddler. Aries marry several times for funnies but never divorce. Their spouses have many freak accidents resulting in death or crippling injury. Being infallible, God is probably an Aries. This would make Satan an Aquarius. Aries always hold management positions. If one is assigned to clean toilets, he will form a one-man union. Then he will go and picket in the parking lot. All of you think you're Lech Walesa. People run away when an Aries comes around. They know that if they do not, the Aries will set them on fire. Aries hate listening to Scorpios talk because they take pride in being even more self-centered. In fact, much to the Scorpios' dismay, you are the biggest pricks in the zodiac. Your rams' horns are in everyone else's asses.
Taurus
You are brooding emotion incarnate. One minute you're up, the next you're down, the next you've shot your favorite newscaster in the kneecaps, "just 'cuz.". You're very earthy, which may mean that you don't shower as often as most people. Or it may just mean that you like to roll around with your nose in clover and sigh. Taureans love happy movies where everyone is jolly and having fun, but they fight with waiters and get upset with billboards. They like to psychoanalyze their friends but have no real experience with life in general. Taureans mumble while describing philosophical concepts.
The Taurus is a strange bird because he or she holds grudges about things that never actually happened. This may stem from the feelings of inadequacy resulting from being beaten out for first in line in the zodiac by Aries. That is the Taurean self-image, always second best. However, they are undoubtedly the best at feeling like second best. All Taureans want to be God. Unfortunately, God is an Aries. You are generally tough to figure out because you answer every question with a question. Also, you won't come out from under the bed. Most Taureans love conflict. If nothing is wrong, then that in itself is something wrong. Some especially like bar fights. If they can't get into an actual bar fight, they will make up interesting stories about them which they can tell their friends right before they psychoanalyze them. If it weren't for Bazooka Joe and The Family Circus, Taureans wouldn't know what to do. You feel that you are going nowhere in life. You are probably right. Milwaukee is full of Taureans. Taureans are impatient and pushy. They are in a tremendous hurry to get to the nowhere that they intend to go to. They make little dioramas of their homes, complete with tiny effigies of the people they know, and act out scenarios of the way things would be if they were God.
Gemini
Everyone loves a Gemini because everyone loves a schizophrenic. You like to think that you are a half-and half mixture of Socrates and Michelangelo, but in reality it's more like Prince and Bea Arthur. You are progressive, outgoing, and one of the most popular rides at Cedar Point. However, you can and will negate all of this by the time you're finished reading this sentence. Geminis drive funny cars. They often drive them into trees or buildings. Geminis are pushy and overbearing. They pick fights with small children and moon people at weddings. They like to use Libras as punching bags. A bisexual Gemini is a walking double date. The rest are hermaphrodites. Geminis vandalize their own houses.
Geminis use far-fetched analogies to describe philosophical concepts. Geminis rarely compete in the Olympics. When they do, it is usually pool or air hockey. Frogger turns up as well. Geminis are always on some sort of medication. This medication is not always legal. Gemini is Latin for "I'm okay, I'm okay." Geminis speak very loudly in order to be heard. This is unfortunate as they are nearly always talking to themselves. In fact, they often pick animated arguments with themselves in the bathtub. The most famous Gemini in history is Orville and Wilbur Wright. Geminis are frequently abidextrous, which means that they can pick both sides of their noses at the same time. The Gemini is essentially nothing more than a paranoid Aquarius.
Cancer
You like to know what's going on in the lives of everyone in the galaxy. However, you tend not know know what's going on in your own. If you are lucky, your friends will tell you. Cancerians only get dressed because they have to, and their fashion sense can only be described as "erratic." You are more likely than any other sign in the zodiac (except Pisces, who does not iron) to iron your clothes by sleeping with them sandwiched between the mattress and box-spring. Likewise, you can stretch one pair of underwear out for almost a month. Your home is like your very own Biodome, and you can remain indoors for months at a time. Despite your need to be everyone's savior, you need no social interaction. SWAT teams often show up, mistakenly thinking there's a hostage situation.
A Cancer is like a walking Ladies' Home Journal, quick on the draw with shortcake recipes and helpful hints on how to talk to your teen. Whether they know it or not, they are all born with an exceptional talent for cross-stitch. So much for buying the world a Coke - they would breast-feed the world if they could. This trait is not gender-specific. You will never excel in sports because you have to rest for fifteen minutes every time you breathe. You do not mind, since you plan to conduct your career from the comfort of your own bed. You maintain your questionable health through a steady diet of Ho-Ho's and beer. You also imbibe a great deal of Pepto-Bismol in order to confuse your numerous ulcers. People walk on you often. Actually, not often - all the time. If you think someone is screwing you, you're probably right. The most entertaining thing about this is that you like it. You strive to be a doormat. Cancerians coin their own words to describe philosophical concepts. This is why it is no surprise that George W. Bush is a Cancer. Cancerians have minimal influence over their friends, even though they show up with homemade soup to remedy every minor or major tragedy. However, they wield their power through the fact that they know what everyone is thinking at any given time. This is why they are never invited to parties. Cancerians claim to be "tactful". The word for this is actually "shiftless". Cancerians are always appointed to take their drunken, drooling friends home. These friends are usually Pisceans
Leo
You will grab attention in any way you possibly can. Self-immolation is not out of the question. You like to kiss mirrors a lot. Genghis Khan was a Leo, and so is Barney the Dinosaur. People still love Lucy, but less because she was a Leo. Leos will interrupt conversation to talk, and they will place themselves bodily in the way of someone who is trying to leave before the Leo is finished saying what he or she needs to say. All Leos want parades on their birthdays. Leos never marry because no one is good enough for them. If they do marry, they keep their spouses locked under the bathroom sink. They need physical affection at all times; unfortunately, they can't find any because everyone thinks they are irritating punks. This is why so many of the people arrested for necrophilia are Leos.
A Leo uses himself as an example of the Overman in order to describe philosophical concepts. Some Leos decide to be homosexual even if they aren't, because they think this gives them shock value. It actually means that neither gender will want to hook up with them. In actuality, anything besides a romantic evening with themselves is considered a step down for the Leo. Leos open doors by screaming at them. They expect their Clappers to applaud when they enter a room. Leos are said to resemble lions. This means that they are loud, have cleft upper lips and slimy noses, and s**t under trees as they walk. They snack on monkeys while watching "Entertainment Tonight". Humility frightens Leos. That is why Jesus was a Capricorn, Buddha was an Aries, and so forth. However, "radical cult leader" is not out of the question. Leos like to start fights with Aries. They will stomp and bloody each other regardless of whether or not they are in public. In fact, the Leos usually prefer it. You will see these fights taking place at bars, sporting events, fashion shows, or Taco Bell. If you are a clever Capricorn, you will sell tickets. Don't worry about hanging posters--Leo will take care of that in advance. Aquarians hang posters of rock stars on their walls. Scorpios hang posters of famous disasters on their walls. Capricorns hang posters of great mathematicians on their walls. Pisceans hang posters of unicorns on their walls. Leos hang posters of themselves on their walls.
Virgo
You are a pain in the ***. You regulate your breathing and color-coordinate the clothes in your closet. No Virgo in history has ever belched. Virgos clean every square inch of everything they own twice daily with a toothbrush. Everything has its place, and yours is on the floor scrubbing with a magnifying glass, checking for germs. Obsessive-compulsive disorder? A nice euphemism for the word "Virgo". Virgos use pointers and elaborate charts to describe philosophical concepts. You commit a lot of drive-by shootings. When you are questioned, you tell the police that it was because "the bastard had a filthy car". The police usually let you go because they are Virgos too. It is easy to freak out a Virgo. Tell them they have something between their teeth. Then watch them scrub frantically at the imaginary thing. Virgos are a hell of a lot of fun for assholes like us. Hell for a Virgo is being locked up in an elevator for eternity with a naked Aquarius. That is because in hell, Aquarians are allowed to bring beer, which they leave all over the floor.
Virgos, however, have to surrender their brooms and squeegees to God. Virgos also have a hard time coping when they find out there's something under the fridge. But it's usually just a depressed Taurus. Virgos have read enough Hints from Heloise to know that the depressed Taurus can be coaxed out from under the fridge with a banana wine cooler. Virgos don't see the world in shades of black and white. They see it in shades of clean and dirty. Cat hair makes Virgos foam at the mouth. Virgos are cool because they will do your laundry for you. They'll separate everything by color and fabric until it consists of fourteen loads of three things apiece. Then they will put them in the washer in alphabetical order by name of manufacturer. Virgos are often found opening and shutting the refrigerator door, attempting to trick the light inside. Don't put cheese where it doesn't belong in a Virgo's refrigerator. He or she will go Jack Torrence on your ***. You will be stabbed with a cuticle pusher. Jack Torrence was probably a Virgo in the first half of "The Shining". After that, he went all Leo.
Libra
You are oh-so-elegant and tasteful to the point of incurring nausea from loved ones. You are also bipolar as hell and can't make a decision on your own. You usually consult your therapist or TV Guide. Libras are trendy and malleable folks. They are funny because they will glom onto something they hated before if it suddenly becomes fashionable. Velour is not entirely lost upon these people. Libras eat a lot of ethnic food from cultures they don't understand. They single-handedly started the cappucino movement. Ask them why, and they will claim something unintelligible about solidarity. You constantly worry about what other people think. If you really paid any attention, maybe people would like you more. Libras use quotes from David Mamet plays to describe philosophical concepts. Then they have those concepts engraved upon nice little wallet cards.
The Libran interest in current events ends with the J. Crew catalog. They don't eat fast food or have any clue where their trash goes. They have other people tie their expensive shoes. Only two Libras have ever been found in thrift stores. All of their bell-bottoms were color-coordinated to match their lamé turtlenecks. Libras are always on the cutting edge of what the rest of us think is absolute pretentious bulls**t. They have huge collections of CDs they've never even listened to. Libras give to designer charities. Hollywood is full of Libras. You are the reason butterfly hairpins and parachute pants have made a comeback. Next on the list is those big jam shorts. You probably never threw out your old pair. Hang on to your Winger t-shirt too. Get a Libra as drunk as possible and he or she will still be able to explain the difference between café latté and café au lait. This is peculiar as the rest of us know that there is no difference at all.
Scorpio
You got into computers early so you could use made-up, bulls**t terminology and get away with it. Most hackers are Scorpios, as are most people who think they're going to find fame on a chat board. You embarrass Libras because you like your coffee straight out of the bag, eaten with a spoon. You may have actually snorted Chock Full o' Nuts at one time in your life. You take your paranoid beatnik approach to life very seriously. Many Scorpios have found ways to successfully smoke in the shower. Your number-one grudge is about never having been abducted by aliens, or being the victim of a government conspiracy. Most of those fake virus warnings or cash offers from Bill Gates are your attempt to stir something up. Ironically, Bill Gates is a Scorpio. The fully-automated barracks he lives in should clear up any doubt.
Your master plan for world domination will never work because it involves you at the helm. It is hard for you to accept that Star Trek is fiction, and you are not a Borg leader. Scorpios use expletives to describe philosophical concepts. It's no wonder that Halloween falls smack in the middle of the Scorpio range. This is the only time of year when fake hauntings, sugar-induced hysteria, and impersonating Dr. Who won't get you arrested. Scorpios have strong sex drives, because it gives them yet another opportunity to smoke. Scorpios have much advice to give on matters that are of no concern to them. If you want to find out if someone is a Scorpio, ask them a pertinent question. Five minutes of silence later, the answer will be "I'm sorry, what?" Scorpios are often hairy and feel that this makes them more virile. This is especially true of Scorpio women. Scorpios cheat at the lottery. If it's automated, they can hack it.
Sagittarius
Sagittarians are born adventurers. They like smashing spiders with their bare hands and trying to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night with the lights out. They would sooner sustain crippling injury than do anything the easy way. Sagittarians love to entertain their friends, family, and total strangers. This often includes transvesticism. Nearly every Sagittarian was born into the wrong gender. Sagittarians are loud and have no social graces. They seek to offend. Sagittarians usually have nicknames like Thunderpooper or Vomitus Maximus. Animals and small children love Sagittarians. This is unfortunate since adults usually hate them. However, Sagittarians make excellent circus freaks and vagrants. Sagittarians use interpretive dance to describe philosophical concepts. Buttons and bumper stickers with rude sayings on them are a trademark of the Sagittarian. They throw food at expensive restaurants and ask lots of questions in the middle of church.
Don't ever bring a Sagittarius home to meet your parents. He or she will tie up your mother and pants your dad. Famous Sagittarians include the Geo Metro. The holiday during which the sun is in Sagittarius is Thanksgiving. This is highly appropriate since everyone eats until they're sick and passes out while a bunch of cross-dressers and huge inflatable things wander through the streets of New York, the most Sagittarian town in the universe. The Shriners driving around in the tiny little cars are a very Sagittarian image. Even more so if there's a ridiculously busty woman stuffed into the car as well. A Sagittarius is always a better Madonna than Madonna. Men can pull off sequins, and women can pull off construction helmets. The Sagittarius is incapable of being unhip.
Capricorn
Capricorns are hardworking, reliable, and dull as hell. They are always on the move, headed to their next delusion of grandeur. They are often good at math which explains why they are such pains in the ***. René Descartes was a great mathematician and a crappy philosopher, so he must have been a Capricorn. Stephen Hawking is even more Capricorn because he's all of the above and a pompous S.O.B. to boot. Sure, he's overcome a lot of obstacles etc. etc., but even in perfect health you can't overcome being a Capricorn. Most politicians are Capricorns, which is why our country is always in the hole. It is not surprising that politicians need so much security around them all the time. Capricorns are like a strange cross between a Leo and a Virgo. They think that this makes them both charismatic and logical. In reality, it means that they are tight-assed and nitpicky, and have to keep their egos in the backyard.
In the event of nuclear war, only cockroaches and Capricorns would find a way to survive. The rest of us just don't want to live in a world like that. The nation's ******** system of toll roads was probably designed by a freakin' Capricorn. They learn how to screw the public over at an early age. Their parents buy them books of law for Christmas so they can underline the loopholes. Capricorns cannot even fathom, much less describe, philosophical concepts because they don't involve equations. (See comments about Descartes and Hawking above) Capricorns own lots of Filofaxes and other tools to organize the lives they do not have. They love to be seen talking on their cell phones. These phones are not actually turned on because Capricorns don't have any friends to call. Capricorns went out of style in 1989. They still believe that Trump was a visionary. Most of the people arrested for counterfeiting are Capricorns
Aquarius
The Aquarius loves a party. Anytime, anywhere is their motto. It is not unlikely that an Aquarius will consider a wake a good place to meet chicks. Aquarians tend to be nostalgic about the 1960s because that was the last time they could be naked in public and get away with it. Aquarians love to be naked. It is even better if they are naked and crocked. 97.4% of the Night Train consumed in the past thirty years has been consumed by Aquarians. Almost every Aquarian will claim to have seen Jerry Garcia's image in their Froot Loops at least once. Froot Loops is a very Aquarian cereal. So is Rice Krispies, since it will engage in a friendly chat with the Aquarian as he or she is eating breakfast. Count Chocula is off-limits, however. It belongs to the Scorpios. Aquarians are the only people in the zodiac who can play volleyball with themselves. And they frequently do.
Aquarians use the phrase "Dude, man..." frequently when describing philosophical concepts. Aquarians have out-of-body experiences on a daily basis. If you are talking to an Aquarian and he or she zones out, consider the conversation hopeless. He or she is talking to the guy three feet away from you. Aquarians are fun because they channel people. Plus, if you tell them to, they will run around naked. Aquarians like astronomy because they've been to all those places. If you want to know what the food is like on Saturn, ask an Aquarius. They can also walk on water if they try really really hard. This usually happens in the bathtub. Aquarians can allow themselves every possible vice on the planet, and don't think twice about it. That is why they piss everyone else off. They are cosmically entitled to do this. Most rock stars are Aquarians.
Pisces
Everywhere you go, laughter and comedy ensue. This would be great if you were trying to be funny. You are deeply confused by the idea of sex. As far as you are concerned, if it didn't happen in "The Velveteen Rabbit", it doesn't exist. Piscean women wear long floaty dresses and enormous amounts of unusual silver jewelry. On hikes. Pisceans claim to love the stars, but the only constellation they can find is the Big Dipper. If they cannot find it, they cry. You remember what you were wearing on March 3rd, 1981 but forget your own address. You have no sense of direction. The people you find going in reverse at 70 m.p.h. on the expressway are usually Pisceans. Pisceans are most likely to die by falling out of a window or getting run over by a truck. That is, of course, unless they live with a Cancer.
Pisceans are so zoned and perpetually endangered that they can bring out the maternal instincts of a Leo. Don't be fooled, however; many Pisceans can surprise you by kicking your *** and the asses of your four imaginary friends. While Leos tend to achieve the most fame in the field of entertainment, Pisceans strive to achieve historical greatness by sheer fluke. They are proud to tell you that Michelangelo, Galileo, George Washington, and Albert Einstein, none of whom had an agent, were all Pisceans. What they won't tell you is that so is Ted Kennedy. Pisceans claim to want "honest criticism" of their work. Then they commit hara-kiri on the floor when you say you don't like it. Never try to use logic with a Pisces; he or she is living about three feet off of the natural ground or in Narnia. Their tools of debate are non-sequiturs, quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and, of course, crying. It wouldn't matter what linguistic devices Pisceans use to describe philosophical concepts because they aren't positive they know what they're talking about anyway. You cry over dead animals in the road but feel no remorse about mowing down humans you don't like. Cancerians say one thing and do another. Scorpios say one thing and do it just for spite. Pisceans say far too much and do whatever the hell they want.
What is your zodiac sign? Does any of this describe you?
Scorpio and yes it's all true. I am the next Bill Gates. lol
Reply:WOOHA!~!!
Reply:HELL NO!!!! I'm a Sagittarius and sure doesn't describe me! You lost me after "crushing spiders with bare hands"
Reply:Cancer
Reply:Im Gemini.Everything there was nearly the exact opposite of what i am..
Reply:libra.
Reply:No way nothing like me.
Reply:Pisces. Agree with some things.
Reply:Cancer.
Stretching out one pair of underwear for a month.... um for one NO and second ewww that's disgusting! LOL Next Cancers is supposedly the motherly sign of the zodiac.... Ladies Home Journal.. not really me although recently I'd been getting into cooking and giving folks advice. Well my style of clothing isn't bizarre, I like to dress just as feminine as the next lady.
As for being walked over, I am a nice person but there is a fine line of being gullible and treating people with kindness-- there were a few folks who wanted to confused the two with me but unfortunately I wasn't letting them have it, now that I'm older and had experiences with these types. I can go down the line of everything written about Cancer and see where it applies to me but I think I'll stop here as I'll be writing for quite awhile.
Overall most of these isn't who I am despite my sign and I take take these 'descriptions' are just for humor. It's funny!
BTW, George W. Bush shouldn't belong to any 'sign'. Personally I think not only is he is an embarrassment to this nation but to Cancerians everywhere!
Reply:Capricorn
Reply:The only truth I found about Scorpios is that Bill gates is one.
Reply:I am Taurus, Your description is not me not even my alter ego.
Reply:I'm a Scorpio, you definition doesn't impress me, but your persistence in typing 14 pages to get your ideas across is mind-boggling, real dedicated aren't you.
Reply:aquarius and no it doesnt
Reply:TAURUS - May 11...OMG, so like me, most of it, few exceptions that I don't see, that someone else might!
Reply:Um, I'm a leo and that is about as opposite of me as one can get...
Reply:I am a Libra, and that was WAY off.
Reply:LMFAO! I'm a Cancerian and my husband is a Pisces...lucky for him, he won't ever get run over by a truck!!
Reply:pisces
Reply:omg yah! im a pisces hehe ♥ i thenk this sort of theng is fun :-} bu ti also thenk u cud read any of them interchangabee, people have usually experianced everee emotion an character trait soem time in their lives, an myself having taken a survey by my therapist, wus often coonfused between two extreames, am i hardwerking an diligent, or lazy? super intelligent, or adorablee dumb? im both, the human being is an amazing theng ♥
Reply:Taurus, and it doesn't describe me.
Reply:tarus here. thats creepy.
but i do not live in millwalkee ( or however thats spelled) and i hate the bar, and i do not wish i was God. everything else came kinda close.
what are you?
Reply:Haha
that was semi cute
I'm a Sagittarius..
Hell no I'm not hitting a spider with my hands
other wise somewhat on point with the rest..
it made me chuckle..
you forgot to put will phuk up anyone that talks ish about them...watch yourself..
holla@urgirl ;O
Reply:Sagittarius
Sagittarians are born adventurers.( I am A naturist That very Adventurous)
They like smashing spiders with their bare hands and trying to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night with the lights out. (Yeap)
They would sooner sustain crippling injury than do anything the easy way. (Yeap)
Sagittarians love to entertain their friends, family, and total strangers. (YEAP especially while naked) This often includes transvesticism.
Nearly every Sagittarian was born into the wrong gender. (Nope)
Sagittarians are loud and have no social graces.
(not so)
They seek to offend.
(not SO)
Sagittarians usually have nicknames like Thunderpooper or Vomitus (Nah) (((Maximus YES max fun while naked oudoors))). Animals and small children love Sagittarians.
(I guess so IDK)
This is unfortunate since adults usually hate them. However, Sagittarians make excellent circus freaks
( NOPE not a freak or vagrant).
Sagittarians use interpretive dance to describe philosophical concepts.
(I love naked danceing at full moon around fires does that count )
Buttons and bumper stickers with rude sayings on them are a trademark of the Sagittarian.
(maybe I did make a bumper sticker kinda that says NIF)
They throw food at expensive restaurants and ask lots of questions in the middle of church.
(NOPE)
Don't ever bring a Sagittarius home to meet your parents. He or she will tie up your mother and pants your dad.
(HAHA All getting naked funny)
Famous Sagittarians include the Geo Metro.
(hahaha I have a GEO Prizm)
The holiday during which the sun is in Sagittarius is Thanksgiving. (YEAP)
This is highly appropriate since everyone eats until they're sick and passes out while a bunch of cross-dressers and huge inflatable things wander through the streets of New York,
(I don't get this one)
NY the most Sagittarian town in the universe.
(((Really Why I can guess that they are consieved on or about St .Pat's day (GO IRISH))))
The Shriners driving around in the tiny little cars are a very Sagittarian image. Even more so if there's a ridiculously busty woman stuffed into the car as well.
(HAHAHA I LIkeY BUSTY Expecially MY LOVE fickleNIF♥™
another Sagittaruis HMMM..
A Sagittarius is always a better Madonna than Madonna. Men can pull off sequins, and women can pull off construction helmets. The Sagittarius is incapable of being unhip.
(NO I am hip to be naked so that very hip)
Reply:im virgo, n its not like me at all lol
Reply:the canser one discribes me alot......buuuttttt, not compleatly. i'm not a slob, tho my consept of 'fasion' is weird. and i'm not a compleat doormat!!
Fun read!!
ALL of thoes are funny!
Reply:im an aquraius and yes i somewhat agree. ok i agree a lot!
Reply:libra
Reply:im a scorpio and that was so not true....i'm NOT hairy lol....but I do like to smoke :)
Reply:oh yeah. i'm a taurus and my husband and son are aries - all fits
Reply:I am a Pisces and I'd say about half of that stuff is true.
Aries have ramlike eyebrows and smug expressions. They should not be quite so smug because they are constantly clunking themselves in the skull. Cat Stevens' "Hard Headed Woman" was probably an Aries. Aries rarely say one thing and do another. They usually do the wrong thing and don't discuss it. Never point this out to an Aries unless you want your kidneys pulled out through your sinuses. Aries folks love Pisceans because Pisces people make them feel well-grounded. Aries love to laugh at the funny moon-people who suck their thumbs at age 35. Aries use guns to describe philosophical concepts. Whether you live in a palatial estate or a cardboard tepee, you will insist until death that it is exactly what you always wanted. Most Aries were concrete parking bumpers in at least two of their past lives. Aries are never born.
They skip gaily from their mothers' wombs. This may even involve rollerblades. The Aries makes life decisions as a toddler. Aries marry several times for funnies but never divorce. Their spouses have many freak accidents resulting in death or crippling injury. Being infallible, God is probably an Aries. This would make Satan an Aquarius. Aries always hold management positions. If one is assigned to clean toilets, he will form a one-man union. Then he will go and picket in the parking lot. All of you think you're Lech Walesa. People run away when an Aries comes around. They know that if they do not, the Aries will set them on fire. Aries hate listening to Scorpios talk because they take pride in being even more self-centered. In fact, much to the Scorpios' dismay, you are the biggest pricks in the zodiac. Your rams' horns are in everyone else's asses.
Taurus
You are brooding emotion incarnate. One minute you're up, the next you're down, the next you've shot your favorite newscaster in the kneecaps, "just 'cuz.". You're very earthy, which may mean that you don't shower as often as most people. Or it may just mean that you like to roll around with your nose in clover and sigh. Taureans love happy movies where everyone is jolly and having fun, but they fight with waiters and get upset with billboards. They like to psychoanalyze their friends but have no real experience with life in general. Taureans mumble while describing philosophical concepts.
The Taurus is a strange bird because he or she holds grudges about things that never actually happened. This may stem from the feelings of inadequacy resulting from being beaten out for first in line in the zodiac by Aries. That is the Taurean self-image, always second best. However, they are undoubtedly the best at feeling like second best. All Taureans want to be God. Unfortunately, God is an Aries. You are generally tough to figure out because you answer every question with a question. Also, you won't come out from under the bed. Most Taureans love conflict. If nothing is wrong, then that in itself is something wrong. Some especially like bar fights. If they can't get into an actual bar fight, they will make up interesting stories about them which they can tell their friends right before they psychoanalyze them. If it weren't for Bazooka Joe and The Family Circus, Taureans wouldn't know what to do. You feel that you are going nowhere in life. You are probably right. Milwaukee is full of Taureans. Taureans are impatient and pushy. They are in a tremendous hurry to get to the nowhere that they intend to go to. They make little dioramas of their homes, complete with tiny effigies of the people they know, and act out scenarios of the way things would be if they were God.
Gemini
Everyone loves a Gemini because everyone loves a schizophrenic. You like to think that you are a half-and half mixture of Socrates and Michelangelo, but in reality it's more like Prince and Bea Arthur. You are progressive, outgoing, and one of the most popular rides at Cedar Point. However, you can and will negate all of this by the time you're finished reading this sentence. Geminis drive funny cars. They often drive them into trees or buildings. Geminis are pushy and overbearing. They pick fights with small children and moon people at weddings. They like to use Libras as punching bags. A bisexual Gemini is a walking double date. The rest are hermaphrodites. Geminis vandalize their own houses.
Geminis use far-fetched analogies to describe philosophical concepts. Geminis rarely compete in the Olympics. When they do, it is usually pool or air hockey. Frogger turns up as well. Geminis are always on some sort of medication. This medication is not always legal. Gemini is Latin for "I'm okay, I'm okay." Geminis speak very loudly in order to be heard. This is unfortunate as they are nearly always talking to themselves. In fact, they often pick animated arguments with themselves in the bathtub. The most famous Gemini in history is Orville and Wilbur Wright. Geminis are frequently abidextrous, which means that they can pick both sides of their noses at the same time. The Gemini is essentially nothing more than a paranoid Aquarius.
Cancer
You like to know what's going on in the lives of everyone in the galaxy. However, you tend not know know what's going on in your own. If you are lucky, your friends will tell you. Cancerians only get dressed because they have to, and their fashion sense can only be described as "erratic." You are more likely than any other sign in the zodiac (except Pisces, who does not iron) to iron your clothes by sleeping with them sandwiched between the mattress and box-spring. Likewise, you can stretch one pair of underwear out for almost a month. Your home is like your very own Biodome, and you can remain indoors for months at a time. Despite your need to be everyone's savior, you need no social interaction. SWAT teams often show up, mistakenly thinking there's a hostage situation.
A Cancer is like a walking Ladies' Home Journal, quick on the draw with shortcake recipes and helpful hints on how to talk to your teen. Whether they know it or not, they are all born with an exceptional talent for cross-stitch. So much for buying the world a Coke - they would breast-feed the world if they could. This trait is not gender-specific. You will never excel in sports because you have to rest for fifteen minutes every time you breathe. You do not mind, since you plan to conduct your career from the comfort of your own bed. You maintain your questionable health through a steady diet of Ho-Ho's and beer. You also imbibe a great deal of Pepto-Bismol in order to confuse your numerous ulcers. People walk on you often. Actually, not often - all the time. If you think someone is screwing you, you're probably right. The most entertaining thing about this is that you like it. You strive to be a doormat. Cancerians coin their own words to describe philosophical concepts. This is why it is no surprise that George W. Bush is a Cancer. Cancerians have minimal influence over their friends, even though they show up with homemade soup to remedy every minor or major tragedy. However, they wield their power through the fact that they know what everyone is thinking at any given time. This is why they are never invited to parties. Cancerians claim to be "tactful". The word for this is actually "shiftless". Cancerians are always appointed to take their drunken, drooling friends home. These friends are usually Pisceans
Leo
You will grab attention in any way you possibly can. Self-immolation is not out of the question. You like to kiss mirrors a lot. Genghis Khan was a Leo, and so is Barney the Dinosaur. People still love Lucy, but less because she was a Leo. Leos will interrupt conversation to talk, and they will place themselves bodily in the way of someone who is trying to leave before the Leo is finished saying what he or she needs to say. All Leos want parades on their birthdays. Leos never marry because no one is good enough for them. If they do marry, they keep their spouses locked under the bathroom sink. They need physical affection at all times; unfortunately, they can't find any because everyone thinks they are irritating punks. This is why so many of the people arrested for necrophilia are Leos.
A Leo uses himself as an example of the Overman in order to describe philosophical concepts. Some Leos decide to be homosexual even if they aren't, because they think this gives them shock value. It actually means that neither gender will want to hook up with them. In actuality, anything besides a romantic evening with themselves is considered a step down for the Leo. Leos open doors by screaming at them. They expect their Clappers to applaud when they enter a room. Leos are said to resemble lions. This means that they are loud, have cleft upper lips and slimy noses, and s**t under trees as they walk. They snack on monkeys while watching "Entertainment Tonight". Humility frightens Leos. That is why Jesus was a Capricorn, Buddha was an Aries, and so forth. However, "radical cult leader" is not out of the question. Leos like to start fights with Aries. They will stomp and bloody each other regardless of whether or not they are in public. In fact, the Leos usually prefer it. You will see these fights taking place at bars, sporting events, fashion shows, or Taco Bell. If you are a clever Capricorn, you will sell tickets. Don't worry about hanging posters--Leo will take care of that in advance. Aquarians hang posters of rock stars on their walls. Scorpios hang posters of famous disasters on their walls. Capricorns hang posters of great mathematicians on their walls. Pisceans hang posters of unicorns on their walls. Leos hang posters of themselves on their walls.
Virgo
You are a pain in the ***. You regulate your breathing and color-coordinate the clothes in your closet. No Virgo in history has ever belched. Virgos clean every square inch of everything they own twice daily with a toothbrush. Everything has its place, and yours is on the floor scrubbing with a magnifying glass, checking for germs. Obsessive-compulsive disorder? A nice euphemism for the word "Virgo". Virgos use pointers and elaborate charts to describe philosophical concepts. You commit a lot of drive-by shootings. When you are questioned, you tell the police that it was because "the bastard had a filthy car". The police usually let you go because they are Virgos too. It is easy to freak out a Virgo. Tell them they have something between their teeth. Then watch them scrub frantically at the imaginary thing. Virgos are a hell of a lot of fun for assholes like us. Hell for a Virgo is being locked up in an elevator for eternity with a naked Aquarius. That is because in hell, Aquarians are allowed to bring beer, which they leave all over the floor.
Virgos, however, have to surrender their brooms and squeegees to God. Virgos also have a hard time coping when they find out there's something under the fridge. But it's usually just a depressed Taurus. Virgos have read enough Hints from Heloise to know that the depressed Taurus can be coaxed out from under the fridge with a banana wine cooler. Virgos don't see the world in shades of black and white. They see it in shades of clean and dirty. Cat hair makes Virgos foam at the mouth. Virgos are cool because they will do your laundry for you. They'll separate everything by color and fabric until it consists of fourteen loads of three things apiece. Then they will put them in the washer in alphabetical order by name of manufacturer. Virgos are often found opening and shutting the refrigerator door, attempting to trick the light inside. Don't put cheese where it doesn't belong in a Virgo's refrigerator. He or she will go Jack Torrence on your ***. You will be stabbed with a cuticle pusher. Jack Torrence was probably a Virgo in the first half of "The Shining". After that, he went all Leo.
Libra
You are oh-so-elegant and tasteful to the point of incurring nausea from loved ones. You are also bipolar as hell and can't make a decision on your own. You usually consult your therapist or TV Guide. Libras are trendy and malleable folks. They are funny because they will glom onto something they hated before if it suddenly becomes fashionable. Velour is not entirely lost upon these people. Libras eat a lot of ethnic food from cultures they don't understand. They single-handedly started the cappucino movement. Ask them why, and they will claim something unintelligible about solidarity. You constantly worry about what other people think. If you really paid any attention, maybe people would like you more. Libras use quotes from David Mamet plays to describe philosophical concepts. Then they have those concepts engraved upon nice little wallet cards.
The Libran interest in current events ends with the J. Crew catalog. They don't eat fast food or have any clue where their trash goes. They have other people tie their expensive shoes. Only two Libras have ever been found in thrift stores. All of their bell-bottoms were color-coordinated to match their lamé turtlenecks. Libras are always on the cutting edge of what the rest of us think is absolute pretentious bulls**t. They have huge collections of CDs they've never even listened to. Libras give to designer charities. Hollywood is full of Libras. You are the reason butterfly hairpins and parachute pants have made a comeback. Next on the list is those big jam shorts. You probably never threw out your old pair. Hang on to your Winger t-shirt too. Get a Libra as drunk as possible and he or she will still be able to explain the difference between café latté and café au lait. This is peculiar as the rest of us know that there is no difference at all.
Scorpio
You got into computers early so you could use made-up, bulls**t terminology and get away with it. Most hackers are Scorpios, as are most people who think they're going to find fame on a chat board. You embarrass Libras because you like your coffee straight out of the bag, eaten with a spoon. You may have actually snorted Chock Full o' Nuts at one time in your life. You take your paranoid beatnik approach to life very seriously. Many Scorpios have found ways to successfully smoke in the shower. Your number-one grudge is about never having been abducted by aliens, or being the victim of a government conspiracy. Most of those fake virus warnings or cash offers from Bill Gates are your attempt to stir something up. Ironically, Bill Gates is a Scorpio. The fully-automated barracks he lives in should clear up any doubt.
Your master plan for world domination will never work because it involves you at the helm. It is hard for you to accept that Star Trek is fiction, and you are not a Borg leader. Scorpios use expletives to describe philosophical concepts. It's no wonder that Halloween falls smack in the middle of the Scorpio range. This is the only time of year when fake hauntings, sugar-induced hysteria, and impersonating Dr. Who won't get you arrested. Scorpios have strong sex drives, because it gives them yet another opportunity to smoke. Scorpios have much advice to give on matters that are of no concern to them. If you want to find out if someone is a Scorpio, ask them a pertinent question. Five minutes of silence later, the answer will be "I'm sorry, what?" Scorpios are often hairy and feel that this makes them more virile. This is especially true of Scorpio women. Scorpios cheat at the lottery. If it's automated, they can hack it.
Sagittarius
Sagittarians are born adventurers. They like smashing spiders with their bare hands and trying to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night with the lights out. They would sooner sustain crippling injury than do anything the easy way. Sagittarians love to entertain their friends, family, and total strangers. This often includes transvesticism. Nearly every Sagittarian was born into the wrong gender. Sagittarians are loud and have no social graces. They seek to offend. Sagittarians usually have nicknames like Thunderpooper or Vomitus Maximus. Animals and small children love Sagittarians. This is unfortunate since adults usually hate them. However, Sagittarians make excellent circus freaks and vagrants. Sagittarians use interpretive dance to describe philosophical concepts. Buttons and bumper stickers with rude sayings on them are a trademark of the Sagittarian. They throw food at expensive restaurants and ask lots of questions in the middle of church.
Don't ever bring a Sagittarius home to meet your parents. He or she will tie up your mother and pants your dad. Famous Sagittarians include the Geo Metro. The holiday during which the sun is in Sagittarius is Thanksgiving. This is highly appropriate since everyone eats until they're sick and passes out while a bunch of cross-dressers and huge inflatable things wander through the streets of New York, the most Sagittarian town in the universe. The Shriners driving around in the tiny little cars are a very Sagittarian image. Even more so if there's a ridiculously busty woman stuffed into the car as well. A Sagittarius is always a better Madonna than Madonna. Men can pull off sequins, and women can pull off construction helmets. The Sagittarius is incapable of being unhip.
Capricorn
Capricorns are hardworking, reliable, and dull as hell. They are always on the move, headed to their next delusion of grandeur. They are often good at math which explains why they are such pains in the ***. René Descartes was a great mathematician and a crappy philosopher, so he must have been a Capricorn. Stephen Hawking is even more Capricorn because he's all of the above and a pompous S.O.B. to boot. Sure, he's overcome a lot of obstacles etc. etc., but even in perfect health you can't overcome being a Capricorn. Most politicians are Capricorns, which is why our country is always in the hole. It is not surprising that politicians need so much security around them all the time. Capricorns are like a strange cross between a Leo and a Virgo. They think that this makes them both charismatic and logical. In reality, it means that they are tight-assed and nitpicky, and have to keep their egos in the backyard.
In the event of nuclear war, only cockroaches and Capricorns would find a way to survive. The rest of us just don't want to live in a world like that. The nation's ******** system of toll roads was probably designed by a freakin' Capricorn. They learn how to screw the public over at an early age. Their parents buy them books of law for Christmas so they can underline the loopholes. Capricorns cannot even fathom, much less describe, philosophical concepts because they don't involve equations. (See comments about Descartes and Hawking above) Capricorns own lots of Filofaxes and other tools to organize the lives they do not have. They love to be seen talking on their cell phones. These phones are not actually turned on because Capricorns don't have any friends to call. Capricorns went out of style in 1989. They still believe that Trump was a visionary. Most of the people arrested for counterfeiting are Capricorns
Aquarius
The Aquarius loves a party. Anytime, anywhere is their motto. It is not unlikely that an Aquarius will consider a wake a good place to meet chicks. Aquarians tend to be nostalgic about the 1960s because that was the last time they could be naked in public and get away with it. Aquarians love to be naked. It is even better if they are naked and crocked. 97.4% of the Night Train consumed in the past thirty years has been consumed by Aquarians. Almost every Aquarian will claim to have seen Jerry Garcia's image in their Froot Loops at least once. Froot Loops is a very Aquarian cereal. So is Rice Krispies, since it will engage in a friendly chat with the Aquarian as he or she is eating breakfast. Count Chocula is off-limits, however. It belongs to the Scorpios. Aquarians are the only people in the zodiac who can play volleyball with themselves. And they frequently do.
Aquarians use the phrase "Dude, man..." frequently when describing philosophical concepts. Aquarians have out-of-body experiences on a daily basis. If you are talking to an Aquarian and he or she zones out, consider the conversation hopeless. He or she is talking to the guy three feet away from you. Aquarians are fun because they channel people. Plus, if you tell them to, they will run around naked. Aquarians like astronomy because they've been to all those places. If you want to know what the food is like on Saturn, ask an Aquarius. They can also walk on water if they try really really hard. This usually happens in the bathtub. Aquarians can allow themselves every possible vice on the planet, and don't think twice about it. That is why they piss everyone else off. They are cosmically entitled to do this. Most rock stars are Aquarians.
Pisces
Everywhere you go, laughter and comedy ensue. This would be great if you were trying to be funny. You are deeply confused by the idea of sex. As far as you are concerned, if it didn't happen in "The Velveteen Rabbit", it doesn't exist. Piscean women wear long floaty dresses and enormous amounts of unusual silver jewelry. On hikes. Pisceans claim to love the stars, but the only constellation they can find is the Big Dipper. If they cannot find it, they cry. You remember what you were wearing on March 3rd, 1981 but forget your own address. You have no sense of direction. The people you find going in reverse at 70 m.p.h. on the expressway are usually Pisceans. Pisceans are most likely to die by falling out of a window or getting run over by a truck. That is, of course, unless they live with a Cancer.
Pisceans are so zoned and perpetually endangered that they can bring out the maternal instincts of a Leo. Don't be fooled, however; many Pisceans can surprise you by kicking your *** and the asses of your four imaginary friends. While Leos tend to achieve the most fame in the field of entertainment, Pisceans strive to achieve historical greatness by sheer fluke. They are proud to tell you that Michelangelo, Galileo, George Washington, and Albert Einstein, none of whom had an agent, were all Pisceans. What they won't tell you is that so is Ted Kennedy. Pisceans claim to want "honest criticism" of their work. Then they commit hara-kiri on the floor when you say you don't like it. Never try to use logic with a Pisces; he or she is living about three feet off of the natural ground or in Narnia. Their tools of debate are non-sequiturs, quotes from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and, of course, crying. It wouldn't matter what linguistic devices Pisceans use to describe philosophical concepts because they aren't positive they know what they're talking about anyway. You cry over dead animals in the road but feel no remorse about mowing down humans you don't like. Cancerians say one thing and do another. Scorpios say one thing and do it just for spite. Pisceans say far too much and do whatever the hell they want.
What is your zodiac sign? Does any of this describe you?
Scorpio and yes it's all true. I am the next Bill Gates. lol
Reply:WOOHA!~!!
Reply:HELL NO!!!! I'm a Sagittarius and sure doesn't describe me! You lost me after "crushing spiders with bare hands"
Reply:Cancer
Reply:Im Gemini.Everything there was nearly the exact opposite of what i am..
Reply:libra.
Reply:No way nothing like me.
Reply:Pisces. Agree with some things.
Reply:Cancer.
Stretching out one pair of underwear for a month.... um for one NO and second ewww that's disgusting! LOL Next Cancers is supposedly the motherly sign of the zodiac.... Ladies Home Journal.. not really me although recently I'd been getting into cooking and giving folks advice. Well my style of clothing isn't bizarre, I like to dress just as feminine as the next lady.
As for being walked over, I am a nice person but there is a fine line of being gullible and treating people with kindness-- there were a few folks who wanted to confused the two with me but unfortunately I wasn't letting them have it, now that I'm older and had experiences with these types. I can go down the line of everything written about Cancer and see where it applies to me but I think I'll stop here as I'll be writing for quite awhile.
Overall most of these isn't who I am despite my sign and I take take these 'descriptions' are just for humor. It's funny!
BTW, George W. Bush shouldn't belong to any 'sign'. Personally I think not only is he is an embarrassment to this nation but to Cancerians everywhere!
Reply:Capricorn
Reply:The only truth I found about Scorpios is that Bill gates is one.
Reply:I am Taurus, Your description is not me not even my alter ego.
Reply:I'm a Scorpio, you definition doesn't impress me, but your persistence in typing 14 pages to get your ideas across is mind-boggling, real dedicated aren't you.
Reply:aquarius and no it doesnt
Reply:TAURUS - May 11...OMG, so like me, most of it, few exceptions that I don't see, that someone else might!
Reply:Um, I'm a leo and that is about as opposite of me as one can get...
Reply:I am a Libra, and that was WAY off.
Reply:LMFAO! I'm a Cancerian and my husband is a Pisces...lucky for him, he won't ever get run over by a truck!!
Reply:pisces
Reply:omg yah! im a pisces hehe ♥ i thenk this sort of theng is fun :-} bu ti also thenk u cud read any of them interchangabee, people have usually experianced everee emotion an character trait soem time in their lives, an myself having taken a survey by my therapist, wus often coonfused between two extreames, am i hardwerking an diligent, or lazy? super intelligent, or adorablee dumb? im both, the human being is an amazing theng ♥
Reply:Taurus, and it doesn't describe me.
Reply:tarus here. thats creepy.
but i do not live in millwalkee ( or however thats spelled) and i hate the bar, and i do not wish i was God. everything else came kinda close.
what are you?
Reply:Haha
that was semi cute
I'm a Sagittarius..
Hell no I'm not hitting a spider with my hands
other wise somewhat on point with the rest..
it made me chuckle..
you forgot to put will phuk up anyone that talks ish about them...watch yourself..
holla@urgirl ;O
Reply:Sagittarius
Sagittarians are born adventurers.( I am A naturist That very Adventurous)
They like smashing spiders with their bare hands and trying to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night with the lights out. (Yeap)
They would sooner sustain crippling injury than do anything the easy way. (Yeap)
Sagittarians love to entertain their friends, family, and total strangers. (YEAP especially while naked) This often includes transvesticism.
Nearly every Sagittarian was born into the wrong gender. (Nope)
Sagittarians are loud and have no social graces.
(not so)
They seek to offend.
(not SO)
Sagittarians usually have nicknames like Thunderpooper or Vomitus (Nah) (((Maximus YES max fun while naked oudoors))). Animals and small children love Sagittarians.
(I guess so IDK)
This is unfortunate since adults usually hate them. However, Sagittarians make excellent circus freaks
( NOPE not a freak or vagrant).
Sagittarians use interpretive dance to describe philosophical concepts.
(I love naked danceing at full moon around fires does that count )
Buttons and bumper stickers with rude sayings on them are a trademark of the Sagittarian.
(maybe I did make a bumper sticker kinda that says NIF)
They throw food at expensive restaurants and ask lots of questions in the middle of church.
(NOPE)
Don't ever bring a Sagittarius home to meet your parents. He or she will tie up your mother and pants your dad.
(HAHA All getting naked funny)
Famous Sagittarians include the Geo Metro.
(hahaha I have a GEO Prizm)
The holiday during which the sun is in Sagittarius is Thanksgiving. (YEAP)
This is highly appropriate since everyone eats until they're sick and passes out while a bunch of cross-dressers and huge inflatable things wander through the streets of New York,
(I don't get this one)
NY the most Sagittarian town in the universe.
(((Really Why I can guess that they are consieved on or about St .Pat's day (GO IRISH))))
The Shriners driving around in the tiny little cars are a very Sagittarian image. Even more so if there's a ridiculously busty woman stuffed into the car as well.
(HAHAHA I LIkeY BUSTY Expecially MY LOVE fickleNIF♥™
another Sagittaruis HMMM..
A Sagittarius is always a better Madonna than Madonna. Men can pull off sequins, and women can pull off construction helmets. The Sagittarius is incapable of being unhip.
(NO I am hip to be naked so that very hip)
Reply:im virgo, n its not like me at all lol
Reply:the canser one discribes me alot......buuuttttt, not compleatly. i'm not a slob, tho my consept of 'fasion' is weird. and i'm not a compleat doormat!!
Fun read!!
ALL of thoes are funny!
Reply:im an aquraius and yes i somewhat agree. ok i agree a lot!
Reply:libra
Reply:im a scorpio and that was so not true....i'm NOT hairy lol....but I do like to smoke :)
Reply:oh yeah. i'm a taurus and my husband and son are aries - all fits
Reply:I am a Pisces and I'd say about half of that stuff is true.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)