11/11/05
Ahmad Chalabi speaks
On Wednesday,
I went to the American Enterprise Institute to see Ahmad
Chalabi. He is often denigrated in the mainstream media and has
been the target of many in the CIA who consider him a dangerous man.
I take a different view. As head of the Iraqi National Congress for
many years, he risked his life seeking freedom for Iraq, and he
showed great skill in creating a united front of Iraqis. He returned
to Iraq while major military operations were going on and attempted
to recruit a brigade of Iraqi soldiers early on—something that we
should have encouraged him and others to do much sooner than we did.
Last year, he was distinctly out of favor, not just with
Arabists/peacenik career folks at State and CIA but also with
Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. Charges were made
that he gave intelligence to Iran.
Today he is the deputy prime minister of Iraq,
and on his visit to Washington this week he got an audience with
Rice and other top administration officials. At AEI, there were a
few demonstrators with bullhorns out front (outnumbered, so far as I
could tell, by members of the press), and in the question-and-answer
period, David Corn of the Nation and a couple of mainstream
media reporters sought to get him to admit he and the INC gave phony
intelligence to U.S. officials before the war. He refused to comment
except to recommend that they read Page 108 of the report of the
Silberman-Robb commission on prewar intelligence.
He made the point as well that it's far more
important now to think about the future of Iraq than to argue about
the past. I won't elaborate all his points; I hope AEI puts a
transcript or video of his comments on the Web. But I do want to
emphasize one that I have written about before: sending oil profits
straight to the Iraqi people.
Chalabi said that he worked hard to put Article
109 into the Iraqi Constitution, which states that Iraq's oil
belongs to the people and authorizes the parliament that will be
elected December 15 to set up a mechanism to do so. And he came out
strongly for a fund that would flow some share of those profits
through to every Iraqi citizen. This would be similar, though he
didn't mention the precedent, to Alaska's Permanent Fund.
Chalabi made the point that this would give all
Iraqis a stake in the new democratic government—including the Sunnis
who voted against the Constitution and who, in some cases, support
or tolerate the terrorist insurgents. I think that point can't be
stressed strongly enough. Sunnis and some Americans criticize the
Constitution for excessive federalism, for allowing the Shiites and
the Kurds to set up regional governments with great autonomy. Their
criticism is usually that this is seen as an attempt for the Shiites
and the Kurds to monopolize the oil money, since virtually all Iraqi
oil comes from areas where they're predominant.
An Iraqi Permanent Fund would utterly refute
such arguments and allay such fears. Sunnis would get the same
checks as everyone else. They would have a stake in the continuance
of the government. They would have a huge incentive not to set up a
separatist state. Chalabi has shown great vision and determination
in advancing this proposal. He also seems to have shown great
political skill. He has now separated himself from the Shiite bloc
that he joined for the elections to the constitutional assembly. He
has instead formed a secular Shiite bloc. And when he was asked
whether he was seeking to be prime minister, he said, "That's for me
to know and you to find out."
