Backing an Iraqi Leader Again, This Time for a Fee : Bizarro world/war profiteering?

[spanone]

nice hat blackwill....anything for a buck

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — In the spring of 2004, Robert D. Blackwill, then the influential Iraq director on the National Security Council, pushed hard to make Ayad Allawi, a tough, secular Shiite with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, the interim prime minister of Iraq.

Mr. Blackwill’s efforts worked. For the next 10 months, until Mr. Allawi’s party lost in the Iraqi elections, he was the first prime minister of the newly sovereign nation — America’s man in Baghdad.

Now, a little more than three years later, Mr. Blackwill is back in the same business: pushing hard to make Mr. Allawi prime minister of Iraq again. But this time, Mr. Blackwill’s powerful lobbying firm, Barbour Griffith & Rogers, is receiving $300,000 from Mr. Allawi for his work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/washington/29blackwill.html?pagewanted=print