Wall Street Journal January 25, 2005 REVIEW & OUTLOOK Corruption in Baghdad? January 25, 2005
Porter Goss appears to be off to a good start in the badly needed housecleaning at the CIA -- or at least he is judging by the resignations among the senior analysts who presided over the myriad U.S. intelligence failures of recent years. More telling still, it is now looking more and more as if in Sunday's election Iraqi voters will deliver a repudiation to Langley's branch office in Baghdad. Let us stipulate that it is grossly unfair to write off interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi as a CIA stooge, as too many in the Middle East have done. His life is constantly at risk, despite the fact that he's guarded by Navy SEALs. And he has made decisions, such as giving the go-ahead for the Fallujah offensive in November, that took political courage no matter who his backers were. But there is no question that Mr. Allawi -- who had never before played a major role in internal or exile Iraqi politics -- would not be where he is today had it not been for the Agency's enthusiastic backing. And why? Because unlike his rival and distant relative, the independent-minded and often-infuriating Ahmed Chalabi, he shared the CIA's view of how things ought to be done in a post-Saddam Iraq. Rather than purging the ranking Baathists who ran the old totalitarian regime -- and who all have blood on their hands at least as informers -- Mr. Allawi wanted to co-opt them in the interests of an easier transition and in hopes of averting a Baathist-Sunni vs. Shiite-Kurd civil war. But we all now know we got that civil war anyway. It's called the insurgency, and the Allawi-CIA strategy has failed to stop it. One of the few consistently effective Iraqi units has been the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi National Guard, a remnant of the old Governing Council composed of fighters from anti-Baathist Shiite and Kurdish militias. Meanwhile, many of the security forces built the Allawi-CIA way have proven to be ineffective at best, and in some cases penetrated by enemy informers. The Allawi government knows it may be punished at the polls for its security failure, which may be the real reason some of its leading members were lobbying the White House in recent weeks for an election delay. One advocate of delay has been interim Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan. And it is in this context that we need to look at the dispute that had him threatening to arrest Mr. Chalabi on Friday. Mr. Chalabi had the temerity last week to accuse the interim government of corruption, not exactly the kind of offense that ought to land a man in jail in the free Iraq most of us are hoping to see. Mr. Shaalan then took to the airwaves -- al Jazeera no less -- and threatened to arrest Mr. Chalabi for "defamation" while promising to hand him over to the Jordanians on entirely different bank fraud charges that date back to the era when Amman backed Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. (Charges, by the way, that have no more public evidence to support them than the CIA's attempt last spring to smear Mr. Chalabi as an Iranian agent. Notice that none of those charges has been substantiated.) Then on Saturday other Iraqi ministers said they knew of no arrest warrant, and that the Defense Ministry had no such authority anyway. That was a relief to those who suspected the arrest threat might be another CIA attempt to discredit Mr. Chalabi, who is one of the most visible candidates on the electoral list with the apparent backing of Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He could well end up in a prominent post in the new government. As for the corruption charges against the soon-to-depart interim government, they certainly merit investigation. Earlier this month Mr. Shaalan and a small circle of others in the Allawi government shipped a whopping $300 million in cash to Lebanon, circumventing regulations promulgated by the old Coalition Provisional Authority to prevent corruption. Even if there was a legitimate arms deal here, as Mr. Shaalan and others claim, the unusual nature of the transaction certainly raises suspicions. Also last week the Los Angeles Times reported the story of Dale Stoffel, an American defense contractor who was killed in Iraq on December 8, shortly after alleging corruption in a Ministry of Defense contract that was likewise routed through Lebanon. Though it initially appeared the killing was an insurgent attack, the possibility has been raised that it was a deliberate assassination. And it's not just the Ministry of Defense that may be a problem. A source of ours who works as a contractor in Baghdad says: "I tried to sign a deal with the MOI [Interior Ministry] -- they wanted a 30% kickback" amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The growing appearance of corruption is one reason this election can't come soon enough. The other is the insurgency. Far from being a reason to delay the vote, the violence is all the more reason to let a democratically legitimate government get on with the business of building effective security forces, free of the Baathist remnants that the CIA has so stubbornly -- and mistakenly -- tried to impose on the new Iraq.
