|
NEW YORK SUN
November 8, 2005
'Unusually Effective'
By Laurie Mylroie Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister and head of the Iraqi National Congress, arrives today on a visit to Washington and New York, his first trip to the United States in nearly two years. The official American invitation reflects a recognition that Chalabi is among Iraq's most effective political figures and a repudiation of an earlier, perverse U.S. effort to "marginalize," if not destroy, him. One of America's most distinguished and knowledgeable Middle East scholars, Fouad Ajami, spent three weeks in Iraq last summer in Mr. Chalabi's company. Mr. Ajami's experience left him convinced that Mr. Chalabi represents Iraq's most capable politician, an unusually effective figure, a man of action, deeply rooted in the country, who bonds with ordinary Iraqis, even as he discourses knowledgeably on Shi'a history and jurisprudence with Iraq's leading religious figures, including Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Mr. Chalabi and those around him, including the ministers of defense, finance, and oil, represent the "center of gravity" of Iraq's government. In an interview with this author, Mr. Ajami described a meeting in Sadr City, the huge, volatile Shi'a slum in Baghdad. The local political leadership gathered to meet with American military officers. The Iraqis naively believed that the commanders could grant "sovereignty" to Sadr City, and they were set to become angry if their request was denied. Mr. Chalabi defused the tensions, explaining that no American officer had the power to grant them sovereignty. The National Assembly had to negotiate a "status-of-forces" agreement with Washington. Mr. Chalabi also reminded them that without America, there would be no liberty in Iraq, and they would not be holding this meeting, even as he also stated that Americans needed to understand and come to terms with the aspirations of the people of Sadr City. The Sadr City leadership expected to receive $380 million from the Iraqi government. Mr. Chalabi could have pandered, Mr. Ajami observes, and left the impression they would receive such funds. Yet Mr. Chalabi explained that the Iraqi government did not have that kind of money. Mr. Chalabi is prepared to tell people what they don't want to hear. At the tomb of the Imam Ali in Najaf, Mr. Chalabi excused himself to pray at the grave of his grandfather, who is buried on the grounds of the shrine. The overseer of the shrine extended an unusual invitation to lunch. As Mr. Ajami remarks, Chalabi is "deeply-rooted" in Shi'a tradition, in a way that Ayad Allawi, the favored candidate of the Arabists in the American and British bureaucracies and in the Arab states surrounding Iraq, can never be. Moreover, Iraqis now understand just how bad post-Saddam politicians can be. The defense minister in the previous, U.S.-appointed interim government, headed by Mr. Allawi, apparently oversaw the theft of $1 billion. The Iraqi government has issued arrest warrants for more than two dozen people, including the minister. This image of Mr. Chalabi will probably be at odds with much of the reporting surrounding his visit. The CIA adopted a vitriolic animosity towards Mr. Chalabi in the 1990s, as the Clinton administration grappled with the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War. After two years of planning, the CIA, along with Britain's MI-6, tried to mount a coup against Saddam. The plot failed disastrously in June 1996, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi officers. Mr. Chalabi had warned director of central intelligence John Deutch that the coup was penetrated, recalls Warren Marik, a retired CIA officer. Rather than acknowledge it had blundered, the CIA blamed Mr. Chalabi, even going so far as to suggest he had given information to Saddam's regime. Much the same has happened regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; Mr. Chalabi is prominent among those the Agency has sought to blame. Yet as the Robb-Silberman commission reported, "CIA's post-war investigations revealed that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments." On the eve of the 2003 war, American intelligence, and most other informed observers, believed Iraq had large quantities of proscribed weapons. That information came from the U.N. Special Commission, UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspectors. Until the summer of 1995, UNSCOM believed it had destroyed most of Iraq's weapons programs. Then, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who oversaw those programs, defected. The Iraqis panicked and disclosed that all their weapons programs had been larger and more sophisticated than they had admitted, but they claimed to have destroyed the material they newly disclosed. UNSCOM asked Iraq to produce evidence - individuals who had participated in the purported destruction or documents detailing it. Iraq provided neither, and two years later it began a series of crises over weapons inspections, undermining support for UNSCOM, whose presence in Iraq ended in December 1998. Hence, President Clinton warned that year, "Think how many can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax. ... Think about all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores." Iraq's challenges to UNSCOM were also an important reason the U.S. Congress passed, by overwhelming majorities, the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, calling for American support of the Iraqi National Congress in an insurgency to overthrow Saddam. Indeed, Senators Levin and Feinstein - who now charge that President Bush manipulated the intelligence on Iraq - were among those who wrote Mr. Clinton, urging him "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraq sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." The smears one may hear about Mr. Chalabi are best understood as part of the political controversy that surrounds the Iraq War. Rather than accept the Bush administration's statements that it believed (with good reason) that Saddam retained proscribed unconventional weapons and that Iraq could use that material, including biological agents, to attack the United States covertly, as Mr. Clinton himself warned during his own presidency, the war's opponents chip away at the rational explanation, and promote an illegitimate one. American officials in Iraq cannot afford to play this blame game, however. They acutely recognize that they need effective and capable Iraqi partners, and that is the fundamental reason for Mr. Chalabi's return. Ms. Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "Bush vs. the Beltway: The Inside Battle over War in Iraq" (HarperCollins). |
