Topics: Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq, Editor's Picks, Foreign policy, neocons, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Middle East, War, jane mayer, New Yorker, George W. Bush, Politics News
One of the iconic images of the early days of the Iraq invasion was the picture of the neocon George Washington, former banker and conman Ahmed Chalabi going back to his homeland as part of a brilliant plan to airlift exiles into the country to create the “new Iraqi army” under the auspices of his front group the Iraqi National Congress.
U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace explained that “these are Iraqi citizens who want to fight for a free Iraq, who will become basically the core of the new Iraqi army once Iraq is free.” It was just one of many farcical elements of the Iraq invasion. (Recall the Jessica Lynch debacle as well as virtually everything that happened under Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.) But then the group that planned and executed that war were very silly people, and Chalabi had their number from the beginning. Jane Mayer in the New Yorker had his number. In her seminal piece from July 2004, she traced back his involvement to the 1990s when Chalabi was cut loose from his long association with the CIA and then went hunting for new patrons. He’s a clever fellow:
Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”
Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.
Chalabi shrewdly understood how Washington works and realized that he needed to leverage some serious state power in his favor. And so he befriended the Republicans in congress who, during the Clinton years, had done their usual hypocritical posturing and turned into situational peace loving isolationists in the face of a Democratic Commander in Chief. Mayer reported that the GOP loved the idea, with right wing extremist Jesse Helms being particularly receptive to the concept of putting Clinton into a box over Iraq. Nobody cared at the time that Chalabi had been convicted in abstentia for being responsible for the collapse of Jordan’s biggest bank or that the CIA found his “information” to be unreliable. Why would they? Their crusade against the president was always based upon lies and misrepresentations. They were brothers in arms.
The night Chalabi arrived in Iraq having enabled an invasion of his own country was a triumph surely very few have experienced. It reached a high point when he sat next to Laura Bush at the 2004 State of the Union but unfortunately, he had betrayed his patrons by doing a little double dealing with their true mortal enemy: Iran. (You know the old Neocon saying: Wimps go to Bagdad, Real Men go to Tehran.) He was accused of forging Iraqi currency with stolen plates from the Iraq mint. And they believed him to have sent his Iranian friends some very sensitive information. These charges were never proven but after a brief stint in the Iraq government in 2005, in which he was held (rightly) responsible for his influence on the U.S. government to institute “de-Bathification” and even more charges of corruption, Chalabi withdrew from the scene. The last we had heard he was holding salons in his basement with various Iraqi experts on finance and government.
