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May 28, 2004
Hitchens: Chalabi's OK
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Christopher Hitchens expounds on his views of Ahmed Chalabi for Slate. Hitchens feel's that much of the accusations against Chalabi are foolish, and, he notes interestingly, that new information about Chalabi's selling secrets to Iran might be less accurate than earlier announced.  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.
As I've said before, I don't really know what to make of the whole Chalabi thing. A lot I hear about the guy makes me edgy.
Yet Hitchens, who's a fairly clear-eyed chap, and much better connected in Washington than I am, seems to be a bit of a Chalabi partisan.
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