The Truth Comes Out

Yesterday, American troops and Iraqi policemen raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, seeking a dozen of his closest associates on fraud, theft, corruption and kidnapping charges. “Let my people go,” Chalabi thundered into the cameras like some Moses by the Tigris. And in one of the strongest signals yet that we have officially worn out our welcome in Baghdad, he added, “We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs.”

To understand just why this is a big deal, it should be mentioned that two years ago, Chalabi was the toast of Washington. As the head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqis living in exile out of the country, he had a single overriding vision – to overthrow Saddam Hussein and set up shop in Baghdad as the leader of a new Iraq. But he had virtually no support in Iraq, so to accomplish that, he needed some heavy-duty firepower to do the job for him.

So he came to America, whispering seductively into the ears of people high up in the neoconservative establishment that Hussein had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and others all believed him hook line and sinker. And by a staggering coincidence, all were obsessed with the notion of “finishing the job” left over from the 1991 Gulf War, when the military drive to throw Iraq out of Kuwait refrained from going on to Baghdad. Combining that with the desire to seize control of Iraq’s oil and their grand schemes of remaking the Middle East, they were primed and ready to listen to Chalabi.

The Clinton Administration, which was also the recipient of INC reports, did not trust Chalabi or his cohorts, seeing them as craven opportunists who were more interested in taking power for themselves than anything else. Undeterred, Chalabi provided a couple of defectors who claimed to have worked at Iraqi WMD sites, and their words were splashed all over friendly media outlets. Other defectors (including Hussein’s son-in-law) who reported that all such weapons had been destroyed were ignored.

The fact that Chalabi was convicted of fraud and embezzlement and was a fugitive from justice in Jordan, the fact that he had not been in Iraq in decades, the fact that he had no backing among the Iraqi people – all were disregarded. He was telling people precisely what they wanted to hear, and that was all that mattered.

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, Chalabi’s allies ascended to power, and immediately began planning his long-dreamed invasion of Iraq. All the while, the INC kept feeding fantastic stories to the Administration, to Congress and to the American media, all of which were accepted without question. Secretary of State Colin Powell used the tales as the basis for his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. (He has since disowned his own testimony as being based on “inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading” information.) Career analysts in the CIA and the State Department, who had dealt with Chalabi before and concluded that he could not be trusted, cautioned their superiors against putting so much stock in him, but their warnings were ignored.

When the invasion finally came in March 2003 and Baghdad fell, Chalabi got what he wanted. He was appointed to the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council and was groomed to be the next leader of Iraq.

But as the search for Hussein’s much-ballyhooed WMD dragged on and nothing was found, the relationship began to sour. The highest American ranks finally began to realize that Chalabi just might have fed them intentionally false information in a successful attempt to dupe Washington. (Oh, and those famous defectors provided by the INC? Turns out their supposed bombshells were wrong, they contradicted each other on key details, and in some cases they never worked at the supposed weapons sites at all.) For his part, Chalabi did not help matters when in February he bragged to the London Daily Telegraph that, “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.”

As a result, he was eased out of power and marginalized. He remains on the IGC, but without authority, and his chances of becoming President of Iraq are now zero. His American funding, amounting to $335,000 a month, has been cut off.

So at long last, the truth about Chalabi finally comes out. He played us like Nintendo for his own purposes, telling people in power exactly what they wanted to hear. He had no compunctions about causing thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to get what he wanted.

This does not, however, let the Bush Administration off the hook. They were obsessed with the notion of “getting” Hussein at any cost and by any means necessary. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it happened. And so they willingly let themselves be conned like a backwoods tourist playing three-card monte in New York.

Chalabi said Hussein was bristling with terrible weapons, and he was believed. He said Hussein was in league with al Qaeda, and he was believed. He said American troops would be unconditionally welcomed as liberators, and he was believed. Anyone who pointed out that Chalabi was a power-hungry crook, that there was no evidence to support his claims, or that all might not go according to plan – they were simply ignored.

We are now paying the price for our leaders’ pathetic vendetta. We are paying for it with a sea of budgetary red ink which we are blithely handing off to our children. We are paying for it with our ruined international credibility. And most tragically, we are paying for it with the blood of our dead and wounded soldiers. Any Administration, Republican or Democratic, which allows itself to be so drastically hoodwinked does not deserve to remain in office.