BY ROBERT L. POLLOCK
Monday, August 29, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
BAGHDAD--"Welcome to the danger zone," says a man I'll call Abbas. It
isn't clear if he means Iraq or Route Irish, Baghdad's perilous airport
road. He wedges his flak jacket against the driver's side door of the
sedan, cocks his pistol, and we head off gingerly, lest we agitate any
nervous soldiers or guards. We deliberately overshoot our destination,
doubling back on narrow streets to Ahmed Chalabi's compound in the al
Mansour district. Abbas's wife calls on the cellphone. She is worried, and
right to be. That night Khalid al-Saaidi becomes the third associate of
Mr. Chalabi to die in two weeks, shot on the Jadiriyah Bridge.
Meanwhile, Baathist insurgents have obtained the phone directory of
another victim--murdered ministry employee Haider Mohammed al-Dujaili--and
are threatening still more. Mr. Chalabi has re-emerged in their eyes as a
prime threat. Why? Because he survived a concerted White House campaign
last year to undermine him, brokering the Shiite-led electoral list that
won the January election and becoming deputy prime minister; because he
had become a major player in the constitution-writing process that
culminated this past weekend; and because he is rapidly becoming a key
figure for U.S. military commanders on the ground here as they contemplate
the feasibility of troop drawdowns.
"Very personally courageous," "not afraid to make decisions," and a
"hugely important figure in Iraq" are among the phrases I heard U.S.
officers apply to him during two weeks I spent in the country earlier this
month. Another sums up the stakes thus: "Chalabi is there to talk about
protecting strategic infrastructure so they can sell oil so they can fund
their own security-force development."
He's referring to the fact that Mr. Chalabi has assumed special
responsibility for oil and infrastructure security--a role in which he is
widely recognized to be making major improvements on the abysmal
performance of L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority and Ayad
Allawi's interim government. I watch him in action firsthand shortly after
my arrival, chairing a meeting of the Energy Committee he helped create.
He suggests that the electrical grid be mapped with GPS, since after a
recent attack it took three days to locate the damage. The issue is
quickly resolved, as a water ministry official informs the room that such
data already exists and that the problem is merely information-sharing.
Then Mr. Chalabi offers a gentle reprimand to the Iraqi Army's deputy
chief of staff for continued reliance on a local infrastructure protection
battalion that has repeatedly failed. What's more important, he asks,
keeping some tribal sheikh happy or keeping the lights on in Bag! hdad?
It doesn't sound like much, but in a society where the modus vivendi
for decades has been to tell people exactly what they want to hear, real
managerial skills are a rare trait. "Chalabi has emerged as a central
figure in the effort to improve infrastructure security," says Gen. David
Petraeus, the overseer of Iraqi Security Force training and one of the few
officials willing to risk offending the foreign policy mandarins in
Washington by going on record about the matter. In particular, Mr. Chalabi
is credited with obtaining additional Iraqi funding and focus on the
effort, resulting in what one U.S. observer calls "the highest crude oil
exports in anyone's memory." Northern exports through the Kirkuk pipeline
have resumed, albeit quietly--lest it become an even more tempting target
for sabotage.
Things now are a little different from the last time I saw Mr.
Chalabi, in June 2004. Then, I had to break away from a military
delegation headed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The
"one-time Pentagon favorite"--what a risible journalistic cliché that's
become--wasn't even on official speaking terms with the arch "neo-con" as
a result of a National Security Council directive aimed at "marginalizing"
him. This meant raiding Mr. Chalabi's home, holding him (unarmed) at
gunpoint, and the filing of trumped-up charges against him by a
Bremer-appointed judge who has since been dismissed from his job by Iraq's
judicial authorities for unethical conduct. Improbable allegations that he
somehow obtained and then passed sensitive U.S. information to Iran
(another anonymously sourced story Newsweek really ought to revisit) had
also appeared. The would-be coup de grace occurred once interim Prime
Minister Allawi took power and U.S. forces began stripping Mr. Chalabi's
gu! ards of their weapons and permits to carry them. If this was
"marginalization," Mr. Chalabi could have been forgiven for wondering if
his elimination was the real intention.
But then something unexpected--at least to Mr. Chalabi's
detractors--happened. He stayed put. The CIA line was that he was a mere
dilettante, who'd give up when the going got rough and retreat to his
"five-star hotels" and "Savile Row suits." Indeed, how could it be
otherwise, given that he had "no support" in Iraq? But that assessment,
like so much else, was part of the CIA's larger Iraq intelligence failure.
A coward, after all, would not have risked assassination by Saddam's
omnipresent Mukhabarat for more than a decade as a high-profile opposition
leader on the slim chance the U.S. might one day finish the job it began
in the first Gulf War. A coward would not have helped lead a Kurdish
military offensive against Saddam-controlled Iraq that ended up provoking
a 1996 counterattack in which hundreds of his compatriots died. And a
coward would not have ventured to Najaf in the violent spring of last year
to successfully talk renegade Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr out of
violence and into politics. (Some have criticized this as opportunism on
Mr. Chalabi's part. But Sadr has been largely quiet since, and officers of
the 1st Armored Division, which led the fight against his Mehdi Army, were
unequivocal last year about Mr. Chalabi's helpfulness.) Also notable was
how most of Mr. Chalabi's old political allies--and potential
rivals--pointedly declined to be part of the marginalizati! on strategy.
Kurdish leader (and current president) Jalal Talabani was a particularly
steadfast supporter, to the point of reportedly rebuffing CIA demands that
he cut his ties.
So, under the most trying conditions, the master
coalition-builder crafted the Shiite-led United Iraqi Alliance that
shocked our spooks and diplomats by dominating the January election. The
other big winners--Shiite religious leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and
Kurdish leaders Talabani and Massoud Barzani--turned out to be the very
same group Mr. Chalabi had united under the banner of his Iraqi National
Congress in the '90s, and which had widely been written off as "exiles."
Mr. Chalabi had enough support to make a credible bid for the prime
minister's post, only to drop out in the face of strong U.S.-Iranian
lobbying (what's "strange bedfellows" in Farsi?) for the Islamist, Ibrahim
al-Jafaari, who has proven to be an ineffectual leader at best.
A final irony is Mr. Chalabi's emergence as a corruption fighter.
Unlike scores of journalists against whom he could probably win libel
cases were he inclined to sue, I don't pretend to know much about Mr.
Chalabi's 1992 bank fraud conviction by a military tribunal in
Saddam-allied Jordan. What I do know is that the biggest alleged thieves
in post-Saddam Iraq have turned out to be those associated with the CIA's
preferred secular Shiite, Mr. Allawi.
The Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit recently charged that Mr. Allawi's
defense minister, Hazem Shalaan, presided over the misappropriation of
hundreds of millions of dollars that could have gone towards
better-equipped security forces. Virtually everyone I spoke to at the
Iraqi Ministry of Defense confirmed this, including the new minister,
Saddoun Dulaimi (an honest man by everyone's account, and a non-Baathist
Sunni to boot). But corruption on the scale suggested by the Audit Board
should be more difficult now that Mr. Chalabi is chairing a Contracts
Committee, which reviews every government expenditure above a certain
threshold.
The Chalabi treatment has confirmed that the CIA really can be as nasty
and incompetent as its critics on the left used to claim. But what
explains the gross political miscalculation by the Bush administration,
which knew the CIA had major problems? Part of it, surely, has to do with
influence of the foreign policy "realists," who didn't really believe in
the regime-change mission and blamed Mr. Chalabi for luring the U.S. into
Iraq. (The idea that Mr. Chalabi did so by passing faulty intelligence has
been thoroughly discredited by the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission.)
Insofar as they had to go through the motions, the realists preferred
Iraqi yes-men. "Get him back in his cage," Colin Powell is reported by the
Washington Post to have demanded of Mr. Wolfowitz after Mr. Chalabi began
pushing for the rapid restoration of sovereignty in late 2003. "I can't
control him," Mr. Wolfowitz is said to have replied. (It should be
conceded that Mr. Chalabi's largely admirable outspokenness sometimes
becomes a fault.)
Another factor was the persistent pressure from Arab autocrats, who
wanted the U.S. to believe the alternative to their rule was theocracy,
and who weren't keen on the example a secular, Shiite-dominated democracy
in Iraq might set. Finally, there was the matter of last year's U.N.-led
exit strategy. It isn't a coincidence that the attacks on Mr. Chalabi
really heated up with arrival in Baghdad of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and
a desperate play by the administration to foist responsibility for
occupation on the international community. The trouble was, Mr. Chalabi
had been busy showing that the U.N. had never really had Iraq's interests
at heart. The Volcker Commission would likely never have been empanelled,
and Oil for Food chief Benon Sevan's alleged corruption exposed, without
the leads Mr. Chalabi provided based on information he obtained while
serving as a member of the Governing Council.
It is perhaps understandable that President Bush--who must bear
ultimate responsibility for his policies--should have succumbed to such
pressures. But it is unfortunate. The marginalization policy meant the
shutdown of an INC operation called the Information Collection Program,
which Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers testified before Congress had
"saved American lives." A military review had concluded that the INC
provided the U.S. with far more actionable intelligence than any other
Iraqi organization, including the Kurdish militias.
As for the war, a visit quickly makes plain that the latest
"quagmire" panic in Washington is widely off the mark. True, the security
situation in Baghdad remains a long way from what it should be; but
neither do the insurgents control swaths of territory--think Fallujah--as
they used to. What's more, the heavy lifting is increasingly being done by
Iraqis. "The Iraqi Brigade that owns Haifa Street has done something that
we could never do," Gen. Petraeus told me over lunch. Iraqi security
forces are far more visible, and with competent Iraqi leadership such
success stories will multiply slowly but steadily. It will be, in Donald
Rumsfeld's famous words, "a long, hard slog." But it should increasingly
be an Iraqi slog.
The more important story, the real determinant of whether Iraq stands
or falls, is the political one. And a key player is a man countless
powerful people around the world have wished would go away. Of course,
there are no "indispensable men"--De Gaulle famously remarked that the
graveyards are full of them--but Mr. Chalabi is as close as you come among
Iraq's political class. He sees the powerful Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani regularly; he is trusted by the Kurds, and, to the extent anyone
is, by Sadr; and he put forth a constitutional oil-sharing proposal that
has a chance of making federalism acceptable to the Sunnis. It is telling
that he was one of the last people huddled with Zalmay Khalilzad in the
wee hours of Saturday, when the U.S. ambassador finally gave the go-ahead
to announce an agreement. Mr. Khalilzad, who has now brokered
constitutions for 50 million newly free people in two countries--and who
deserves a medal for his efforts--is a man who knows who to ! have by his
side when a deal has to get done.
The question now is whether his bosses in Washington are mature enough
to put aside past mistakes and work with Mr. Chalabi. They certainly no
longer have to worry about him being written off as an American puppet.
Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at the Journal.
