Is
Chalabi Iran Spy Charge a ploy? The latest news from
the US is that Ahmad Chalabi is an Anti-US Iranian spy.
It just does not wash. He is too closely tied to the
Pro-Likud NeoCon fringe. If Chalabi is a spy it is for
Israel, he has a lot in common with William Safire and
Judy Miler.
Head of The I.N.C.
Close to Prince Hassan of Jordan and is
backed strongly by the Neo-Conservative section in the US
Government.
Chalabi was born into a wealthy Shia
family with close ties to Hashemite monarchy.
Chalabi left Baghdad in 1958 when the
Hashemite monarchy was overthrown.
Close to Bernard
Lewis the Islamic scholar. Linked to David Frum.
James Woolsey
has been the attorney for Chalabi and The I.N.C.
Was key in a failed plot to install Prince Hassan as King of Iraq in
a Constitutional Monarchy.
Dr. Chalabi.
Contact: I.N.C. Washington (202) 338-5517; INC London
(0181) 960 4007
June 20, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
After Saddam
The controversy over Ahmad Chalabi.
By Max Singer
While much attention is paid to the consensus in
Washington that Saddam Hussein must be replaced,
the debate over his successor has largely been
hidden.
Yet the question of who would replace Saddam is a
critical component of U.S. strategy, both with
respect to how Saddam should be ousted and the
American vision for the Middle East.
The debate over who should succeed Saddam begins
with Ahmad Chalabi, leader
of the Iraqi opposition movement, the Iraqi
National Congress (INC). People who know him
well think he has the potential to be one of the
great Arab leaders of this century. But there are
widely divergent judgments about Chalabi among
senior American policymakers and among those
counted as experts on the Middle East.
The State Department, Central Intelligence
Agency, and the experts associated with them
believe that Chalabi is a small-time opportunist
and playboy trying to use his position in the INC
to make something for himself.
They recognize that he is intelligent and
charming, but believe that he is of dubious
integrity and without the qualities required for
leadership and respect in the Arab world, or the
strength to lead either a revolution or a new
government. A
prominent exception to this pattern is James
Woolsey, who was the director of the CIA part of
the time it was helping the INC, and does not
share these negative views.
But first, the undisputed facts. Chalabi is from
one of the old powerful and wealthy Baghdadi
families which were forced into exile when the
Baath Party seized power in 1958. He studied at
MIT and then earned a doctorate in mathematics
from the University of Chicago in 1969. Rejecting
opportunities at American universities, he
returned to the Arab world to teach mathematics
at the American University in Beirut, where he
met his wife, the daughter of one of the signers
of the Lebanese declaration of independence.
Chalabi is a modern man of the West, who founded
a successful software company in London and who
understands democracy deep in his bones. What
makes him truly exceptional is that he also
continues to be deeply a man of the East, with
the sensibilities and loyalties of his ancient
Baghdad Arab and Muslim roots. Because of the
family connections that still count for so much
in the Middle East, he is comfortable negotiating
with Sunni tribal sheikhs and Shia ayatollahs,
familiar with the patterns of relationships that
go back generations and form the structure of
Iraqi and Arab politics.
In 1978 he opened the Petra bank in Amman,
Jordan, in which he invested much of his capital
and which was very successful until it was seized
by the Jordanian government in 1989. The State
Department and the CIA often say Chalabi's bank
was seized because he had improperly diverted
assets, and note the Jordanian government claim
that Chalabi was wanted for questioning and that
the bank failed some time after it was seized.
On closer examination, however, the story of
Chalabi's supposed Jordanian scandal does not
hold water. Those familiar with the facts say the
bank was seized because Chalabi had been using
its international connections to obstruct Iraq's
efforts to finance its war with Iran. As a
result, Saddam put pressure on Jordan's King
Hussein to close the bank. This view is
consistent with the official report of the
Jordanian officer assigned to seize the bank, the
fact that much of the money lost was Chalabi's
own, that it was Crown Prince Hassan who
protected Chalabi by personally driving him to
the border when the bank was seized, that King
Hussein held four friendly public meetings with
Chalabi (the last in 1998), and that the king
subsequently worked to restore Chalabi's position
in Jordan.
It is likely that the best-informed people at the
State Department and CIA know better, and yet
find it useful not to debunk the anti-Chalabi
story. We must look elsewhere, then, to discern
the real reason for the bureaucratic antipathy to
Chalabi.
After the Gulf War the CIA was trying to arrange
a coup against Saddam by Iraqi generals in
Saddam's inner circle. They believed that such a
coup would become more likely if there were a
small domestic political opposition movement
which might be a reason or an excuse for the
generals to remove Saddam. The CIA had already
created an opposition organization called the
Wifaq that they controlled and which was composed
of former Iraqi military officers and former
Baathist Party leaders. They recognized, however,
that the Wifaq lacked political credibility and
so they offered to help Chalabi create a new
organization called the "Iraqi National
Congress." The agency thought Chalabi would
create a small and tame propaganda organization
that would not cause too much trouble, but
Chalabi created a genuinely representative Iraqi
political organization that was independent and
that decided it wanted to fight to overthrow both
Saddam and his whole regime.
With support from the CIA and more than $10
million of his own and his family's money,
Chalabi's INC created
an open political opposition movement in northern
Iraq from 1993-1996, operating newspapers, radio
stations, and a lively political process
involving Iraqis from all parts of the country.
It also created a small military force that
succeeded — with help from one of the
Kurdish militias — in attacking and
destroying two divisions of the Iraqi army.
Despite later loose charges to the contrary, the
money received by the INC from the U.S. was
well-accounted for and spent with extraordinary
efficiency, greatly impressing many Congressional
visitors who came to see for themselves, and
making some of the Americans brought by the CIA
to work with the INC among the most loyal of
Chalabi's supporters to this day.
It is a mark of Chalabi's character that he has
gained such a large band of volunteer advisers
and supporters not only among Iraqis but also in
England and the US. And despite being as
fractious a group as any set of exile political
figures, and quite diverse, the Iraqis who have
joined the INC have continued to keep Chalabi as
their clear leader despite the year-long effort
of the State Department to find an alternative
under the cover of "broadening and unifying
the opposition."
Chalabi's admirers today also include leading
academic experts on the Middle East who have
known him well for many years, such as Fouad
Ajami, a Lebanese Arab who is the author of the
much-admired book The Dream Palace of the Arabs,
and Bernard Lewis,
probably the premier scholar of Islam in the
world. A number of U.S. senators have also come
to know him, including Joseph Lieberman and Trent
Lott.
Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz all know
from their personal contact with Chalabi —
and their own checks of his background —
that the State/CIA view of him as a small-time
exile opportunist of shady character is wrong.
They believe, on the contrary, that Chalabi is a
man who has the character, vision, and strength
needed to become an outstanding leader who can
help move the Arab world away from the path of
anti-American and backward-looking tyranny and
toward a path of struggle toward modernity and
democracy. If their assessment of him is sound,
Chalabi could be the key figure in the success of
President George W. Bush's new policy against
terrorism, tyranny and threats of biological and
nuclear war.
Differences of emphasis and nuance in the
judgment about key facts and personalities are
natural, but the gap in understanding between
State and CIA on one side and Chalabi's admirers
on the other is impossibly wide.
One side or the other must have the facts wrong.
And the question of which group is correct about
Chalabi is crucial for U.S. policy. Bush should
do whatever he needs to do to decide who is right
and to make a policy decision about whether the
U.S. is going to support Chalabi. We cannot
afford to take the chance of sacrificing such a
decisively valuable potential partner out of
reluctance to come to grips with an uncertainty,
especially one that seems to be the product of
bureaucratic enmities and Saudi fears of what
would happen if a great Arab democrat came to
power nearby.
— Max Singer is a senior fellow at the
Hudson Institute and the Begin-Sadat Center for
Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-singer062002.asp
|
For Further Reading:
Guide to
Rugs & Books
La Miniature
En Orient
Southwest Asia Time
Line
Notes on the War
on Terrorism
For Further Reading:
Thanks and best wishes,
J. Barry O'Connell Jr.
|
