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Ahmad and MeDefending Chalabi.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Thursday, May 27, 2004, at 5:12 PM ET

I first met Dr. Ahmad Chalabi in the spring of 1998, a year when George Bush was still the governor of Texas and when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were talking at a high volume about the inescapable necessity of removing Saddam Hussein from power because of his continuous connection to terrorism and his addiction to weapons of mass destruction. (Remember ... ?) It was also the year that the Senate passed, without a dissenting voice, the Iraq Liberation Act.

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At our long meeting, Chalabi impressed me for three reasons. The first was that he thought the overthrow of one of the world's foulest-ever despotisms could be accomplished. I knew enough by then to know that any Iraqi taking this position in public was risking his life and the lives of his family. I did not know Iraq very well but had visited the country several times in peace and war and met numerous Iraqis, and the second thing that impressed me was that, whenever I mentioned any name, Chalabi was able to make an exhaustive comment on him or her. (The third thing that impressed me was his astonishingly extensive knowledge of literary and political arcana, but that's irrelevant to our purposes here.)

The anti-Chalabi forces, I found upon inquiry, had several criticisms to make. The first was that he was a shady businessman whose Petra Bank had fleeced the depositors of Jordan. The second was that he was an "exile," remote from Iraq's reality. The third was that he was too close to the Iranians. The fourth was that he was too ambitious. The fifth was that he was an American puppet.

I do not know what happened at the Petra Bank, and not even Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, who have done the most work on the subject, can be sure that Saddam Hussein's agents in Jordan were not involved in the indictment of Chalabi by a rather oddly constituted Jordanian court. It could be, for all I know, that he was both guilty and framed. The litigation and recrimination continues, and it ought at least to be noted that Chalabi still maintains he can prove his case.

As for "exile"—a term used as a sneer by many people who have never set foot in Iraq—it is a word that would cover Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Andreas Papandreou, Benigno Aquino, and Kim Dae Jung, to name a few. Admittedly these brave men (four of whom I have met) were in prominent positions in existing mass-based parties before they fled their homelands, later to return as leaders. No less admittedly, Iraq for several decades had seen a complete, nightmarish extirpation of all independent political life. The only surviving party worth the name was the Iraqi Communist Party (which incidentally sits on the Iraqi Governing Council and has generally good relations with the Iraqi National Congress). Moreover, Chalabi during the 1990s had actually spent a good deal of time in liberated northern Iraq, and many Iraqis and Kurds who had had their doubts about him had been impressed by his courage, especially during the mini civil war that broke out between Kurdish factions.

As for Iran, it is the most significant of Iraq's neighbors, and no aspiring politician can avoid the responsibility of conducting relations with it. Chalabi has never made any secret of his closeness to Tehran, and he operated a headquarters there, with the full encouragement of the U.S. government, during the run-up to the intervention. This necessarily involves a managed compromise between competing Shiite forces in both countries, at a time when both populations are anxiously awaiting developments in each other's societies. If any Iraqi is "brokering" relations with Iran, I hope it's Chalabi.

The last two allegations—too ambitious and too much of a puppet—are respectively irrelevant and absurd. Anyone taking part in the Iraqi transition has to be a full-blown hardnose, and the charge of puppetry, never very convincing, seems to have been dropped lately.

It has now been replaced with a whole new indictment: that Chalabi tricked the United States into war, possibly on Iran's behalf, and that he has given national security secrets to Iran. The first half of this is grotesque on its face. Even if you assume the worst to be true—that the INC's "defectors" were either mistaken or were conscious, coached fabricators—the fact remains that the crucial presentation of the administration's case on WMD and terrorism was made at the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting right behind him, after those two men most hostile to Chalabi had been closeted together. Nor does the accusation about an alternative "stove pipe" of disinformation, bypassing the usual channels, hold much water (or air, or smoke). Woodward's book Plan of Attack makes it plain that the president was not very impressed with Tenet's ostensible evidence. The plain and overlooked truth is that the administration acted upon the worst assumption about Saddam Hussein and that he himself strongly confirmed the presumption of guilt by, among many other things, refusing to comply with the U.N. resolution. This was a rational decision on the part of the coalition. After all, German intelligence had reported to Chancellor Schröder that Saddam was secretly at work on a nuke again: The French government publicly said that it believed Iraq had WMD, and even Hans Blix has stated in his book that at that point, he thought the Baathist concealment apparatus was still at work. Whoever and whatever convinced all of these discrepant forces, it was not Chalabi's INC or Judith Miller's work in the New York Times.

As to the accusation that Chalabi has endangered American national security by slipping secrets to Tehran, I can only say that three days ago, I broke my usual rule and had a "deep background" meeting with a very "senior administration official." This person, given every opportunity to signal even slightly that I ought to treat the charges seriously, pointedly declined to do so. I thought I should put this on record.

Some of my Iraqi and Kurdish comrades have expressed a different misgiving about Chalabi: that he has been playing confessional politics and maneuvering with the Shiites to get himself a power base. I entirely share their distaste for this kind of politics, but I don't see—now that there are politics in Iraq once more—that anybody is not involved to some extent in playing the sectarian or tribal cards. Chalabi says in his own defense that it's necessary to keep good relations with the Sistani bloc and that the ayatollah has been very helpful: most particularly in his fatwa against private revenge by those Shiites who lost relatives, or limbs, to the hateful former regime. And I would add in Chalabi's defense that he did call for an earlier transfer of sovereignty and earlier elections: an odd position for a man with "no base" to take and also the position now taken, with differing degrees of regret and remorse, by almost everyone involved. Again, if there has to be a "Mr. Shiite" in Iraq, I can think of worse candidates than Chalabi.

It is clearer every day that Iraq under Saddam was becoming a failed state as well as a rogue state. The immiseration and humiliation of its people, the looting and degradation of the economy and society, the resort to jihadist rhetoric and measures by the Baath Party and the opening given to clerical demagogues were all even worse than we thought. If this vindicates anybody, it vindicates those who urged a swifter and earlier international rescue expedition. Those who would have left Iraq to rot were only postponing an evil day that would have become steadily more ghastly and costly. Chalabi had been saying this for six years by the time I met him in 1998: Those who now say that the whole mess is his fault are panicking and scapegoating, as well as attributing superhuman powers to one individual. Of course, if he was that good, and that powerful, one might even want to bet on him all over again.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His book Blood, Class and Empire, has just been published in paperback.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

What strikes me most about Hitchens' latest piece is the second paragraph, when he tells us what most impressed him about Chalabi. I do find it somewhat laughable that campaigning for Saddam Hussein's overthrow in 1998 from the safety of exile was a particularly brave act, but perhaps Hitchens had a much higher opinion of Saddam's foreign assassination capabilities. Hitchens then goes on to tell us how impressed he was with Chalabi's exhaustive knowledge of Iraqis as well as political and literary arcana.

Perhaps Hitchens intended this description as a way of showing us that Chalabi wasn't the out-of-touch exile he was often accused of being. Still, one would hope that Hitchens' knowledge of history would have provided him with enough perspective to realize that he comes off sounding like those intellectuals fascinated by Hitler or Mao or Castro. That clever, ambitious men are able to bring "intellectuals" under their sway is nothing new, yet Hitchens' seems clueless as to how pathetic a defense of Chalabi which begins by describing him as intelligent and knowledgeable really is.

From there, of course, we move on to the usual pathetic rationalizations: where the missing WMDs become Powell's fault for distrusting Chalabi, and one must not draw sinister conclusions from Chalabi's dealings with those malevolent Khomeinists (a term which has magically disappeared; perhaps it doesn't apply to those Shi'ites who are friends with Ahmad).

Yes, Chris, we know the script: Four legs good, two legs better.

Perhaps the Iraqi's disinterest in being ruled Chalabi will turn out to be Chris' saving grace, as it means he will never have to face the accusation of backing just another petty despot.

--W_H_Sleeman

(To reply, click here)

I agree with Hitchens that Chalabi should not be dumped for the problems American occupiers are facing in Iraq.

I think Chalabi did an excellent job in initiating overthrow of Saddam to save his country from further oppression. It would be still premature to conclude that Chalabi's intelligence on WMD was flawed. The recent discovery of Sarin-laced RPG is not accidental, since Sarin does not happen by accident; it is a man-made chemical. There should be no doubt that if Saddam remained in power and was not under constant U.N. inspections, he would have continued his WMD and nuclear programs. Any such program in any Islamic nation is a grave threat to the free world.

Chalabi's business deals could be considered shady by the American legal standards, but they are in line with Enron or Tyco standards. In Jordan or in Iraq, there are no legal standards for business. One can not be accused of swidling if there are no laws defining what that term means.

Chalabi seems to have an exceptional ability to pull exceptional deals between rival parties like the Shiietes and Sunnis, the Kurds and the Shiietes, and so on. It is the ability that the American occupiers lack. He may be the most hated political candidate in Iraq, whom the Iraqis would find most useful.

I also agree with Hitchens that the future Iraqi self-government can not afford to put Iran on the axis of evil to gain favorable status from the United States. A wise politician would seek to thaw relationship with its neighbors after some forty years of wars and misunderstanding. A peace between Iraq and Iran is in the interest of the United States and the world.

In spite of Chalabi's shrewd diplomacy, I don't think he can qualify to become Iraq's President or even a Vice-President in the immediate future, because Iraq is not quite ready for a secular democracy that Chalabi or his American sponsors seem to be pushing for. The best that can be hoped in Post-U.S. Iraq is a theocracy, similar to Pakistan where the elections are held but never honored, or similar to Saddam's version of democracy with 99.9% voting for the incumbent office-holder, except that Saddam would be replaced by some Ayatollah. To be fully democratic, the people would have to rise up from their Islamic beliefs which run against the grain of democracy.

--satish_desai

(To reply, click here)

…The supposed "sneer" about Chalabi being an exile isn't really a sneer at all, but a legitimate expression of doubt about his credibility as a political leader. However stellar and interesting a fellow Hitchens may think Chalabi is, what with his knowledge of literary arcana and all, the whole point of being a leader is that one has followers, and this is precisely what Chalabi lacks — except of course his dwindling harem of militarist neocon sponsors, but I'm not sure they count since they aren't Iraqis. The other notable political exiles that Hitchens mentioned were credible and serious political people who earned their respect within their own countries both before they left and afterwards, when they devoted their energies to the betterment of their native lands, as Chalabi rather conspicuously has not.

Forget Benigno Aquino and the other heroic exiles out of whose cloth, Hitchens seems to imply, Ahmad Chalabi is also cut. (And who, like Chalabi, were lucky enough to have met Christopher Hitchens.) A fairer (but still probably too charitable) comparison would be something like the following: Let's say you've got a Cuban-American whose family left Cuba during revolution when he was a child, and who subsequently moved to Canada and became a successful businessman through a series of questionable if not outright dishonest dealings, as a result of which he moved to Colorado and became a US citizen and started other businesses. Then in the early 1990s the guy gets a sudden interest in freeing his homeland and puts himself forth as a prospective replacement for Fidel Castro, sucking up funding from the US government until an audit determines that the money is going nowhere but the pockets of the organization. (Which is what happened with the INC back in the mid-1990s.) Most reasonable people might look a bit askance at such a fellow…

--O_Hellenbach

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