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The Rise and Fall of Chalabi: Bush's Mr. Wrong
Ahmad Chalabi may go down as one of the great con men of history. But his
powerful American friends are on the defensive now, and Chalabi himself is
under attack.
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Karim Ben Khelifa for Newsweek / Karim Ben Khelifa
Ahmad Chalabi's home in Baghdad
after a raid by U.S. troops and Iraqi
police
Dateline NBC
• Disable Fly-out
By Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
May 31 issue - For the hard-liners at the Defense
Department, the raid came as a surprise.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his
senior deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas
Feith, got the news from the media. When Iraqi
police, guarded by American GIs, burst into the
home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi
National Congress, looking for evidence of
kidnapping, embezzlement, torture and theft, the
men who run the Pentagon were left asking
some uncomfortable questions. "Who signed off
on this raid?" wondered one very high-ranking
official. "What were U.S. soldiers doing there?"
asked another, according to a source who was
• High
Cured
Measu
• Worl
global
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present in the room.
Story continues below ↓
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Until at least very recently, Chalabi had been the
darling of these top Pentagon officials. How could
it be that the men who run the most powerful
military in the world could not know that their
own troops were about to run a raid on a man
once regarded as the hope of free Iraq? Just last
January, Chalabi had been seated behind First
Lady Laura Bush at the State of the Union
Message. Now, according to intelligence officials,
he is under investigation by the United States for
leaking damaging secrets to the government of
Iran.
SEARCH THE SITE
A civil war simmered in Iraq last week, not between Sunnis and Shiites,
but between American government officials. On the one side are the
neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the Bush administration who
backed Chalabi as a freedom fighter; on the other are the spooks and
diplomats who have long distrusted the former Iraqi exile with a taste
for well-cut suits. The neocons, who once swaggered, seem to be
slipping, losing confidence and clout. It is telling that the ground
commanders in Baghdad who participated in the raid on Chalabi
headquarters did not bother to inform their chain-of-command
higher-ups at the Pentagon. (The raid was apparently OK'd by the
American proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, probably with tacit
approval of White House officials.) Embarrassed by horrific images
from Abu Ghraib, a growing number of uniformed soldiers are blaming
their political bosses in Washington—Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and
Feith—for whatever goes wrong in Iraq.
Americans may be beginning to wonder: is anyone in charge over
there? For an administration that prides itself on clarity of leadership,
the Bushies seem to be lost in the Mesopotamian sandstorm. Everyone
and no one was responsible for the prisoner-abuse scandal; the
deadline for turning over the country to a new government is five
weeks away, and the outcome is highly uncertain. Chalabi, who was
supposed to be Our Man in Baghdad, is now whipping up anti-American
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sentiment. It wasn't long ago that Chalabi was touted as a great
democrat, a friend of Israel, an Arab who "thought like us." He was
going to help Americans reshape the troubled Middle East in our own
image. But just as Chalabi once seemed to personify the utopian
dreams of the true believers—remember those bouquets that would
greet the troops?—his fall from grace suggests a more depressing turn
in the Iraq reality show.
TALK TRANSCRIPT
Mark Hosenball joined us for a live talk on Friday, May 28 to
discuss Chalabi's fall from grace. Read the transcript.
Chalabi should not be a scapegoat for all that ails the American
occupation of Iraq. When it served their own ideological agenda, his
neocon sponsors engaged in a willing suspension of disbelief. The
ideologues at the Defense Department were warned by doubters at the
State Department and CIA that Chalabi was peddling suspect goods.
Even so, the Bushies were bamboozled by a Machiavellian con man for
the ages. Chalabi (who vigorously denies wrongdoing and has donned
a martyr's robes) has survived a fraud conviction, betrayals and
scandals before. He may yet emerge on top. His story would be darkly
entertaining, even funny after the fashion of a late John le Carre novel,
if the consequences were not so serious.
Chalabi, 59, is a Savile Row Shiite who has spent much more time in
London than in Baghdad. His career as a banker has been a trail of
lawsuits and investigations (and one conviction for fraud, in absentia
by a military court, in Jordan; Chalabi says he was framed by Saddam
Hussein). Along the way, Chalabi has worked as an American spy and
enjoyed the life of bon vivant —and friend to the great. Though he
plotted for years to overthrow Saddam, he was not taken seriously by
the regime. NBC's Tom Brokaw recalled a conversation with a friend of
the then Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz on a trip to Baghdad in the
summer of 2002. "You guys can have Chalabi!" the Saddam flunky told
the American newsman. "You can keep feeding him all the prime rib
and expensive Scotch. He doesn't know anyone here. He hasn't been to
Iraq in 25 years."
But Saddam's henchmen underestimated Chalabi's wiles and staying
power. He may be a dandy, but he is also a nervy risk taker. If he
reinvents himself as an Iraqi patriot, his moral shortcomings may even
be overlooked by history. Who remembers that in his day, Simon
Bolivar, the liberator of South America, was regarded as a crook?
Engaging scoundrels can be effective, if they don't get killed by the
enemies they make (or fool) along the way.
Chalabi has not always charmed his patrons. His first run as a CIA
asset in the early- and mid-' 90s was a disaster. Chalabi's attempts to
foment an insurrection were aborted in a fiasco still known around the
agency as the "Bay of Goats." His case officers didn't trust him. "There
was a lot of hanky-panky with the accounting: triple billing, things that
weren't mentioned, things inflated... It was a nightmare," says a
former U.S. intelligence official who worked with Chalabi. "His primary
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focus was to drag us into a war that [President] Clinton didn't want to
fight."
Chalabi had more luck
with a group of
Will the United States launch military action
Republican hard-liners
against Iran over its nuclear program?
who formed a kind of
j Yes
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government-in-exile in
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the 1990s. So-called
j Not sure
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neoconservatives like
Wolfowitz and Richard
Perle, the veteran
Vote to see results
bureaucratic infighter
known in the Reagan administration as the "Prince of Darkness," were
drawn to Chalabi's ideas. Several, like Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, a
then obscure Washington lawyer who had once worked for Perle at the
Pentagon—and now serves—as under secretary of Defense for
policy—began talking about a speech Chalabi gave to the Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs in June 1997. In that
speech,Chalabi promised that Saddam could be overthrown on the
cheap if the United States dared back a guerrilla force led by Chalabi.
(Feith told NEWSWEEK that he found Chalabi's vision of post-Saddam
Iraq to be "quite moving.") A side benefit, Chalabi suggested in his
conversations with the neocons, would be an Arab country friendly to
Israel. Soon Chalabi was dining from time to time with Perle, a fellow
epicure.
LIVE VOTE
But Chalabi was broke, or nearly so. In 1998 he and his friends
skillfully lobbied Congress to provide funding for his organization, the
Iraqi National Congress. The Iraq Liberation Act passed with
overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans. It was seen as
an easy vote, giving the appearance of taking a stand against Saddam
without actually having to do much.
Clinton had no intention of going to war with Iraq. Bush might not have
either, but for 9/11. Before the terrorists struck, Bush administration
policy toward Iraq consisted mostly of a futile attempt by Secretary of
State Colin Powell to fiddle with sanctions against Iraq before the
United Nations dropped them altogether. But the neocons in the Bush
cabinet, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, were ready to
march on Baghdad before the World Trade Center stopped smoldering.
President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld
were all itching to show off American strength. The rest of the
government and the American people needed some persuading. Ever
the opportunist, Chalabi came along to tell the war hawks just what
they wanted to hear—and to provide the sort of frightening "evidence"
that could galvanize the nation into action.
Continued
Page 2: The Bush Administration's Source of Dubious
Intelligence
Page 3: Did Chalabi Influence the de-Baathification of Iraq?
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek
02/15/07 9:50 AM