The American Spectator

Special Report

When Quislings Go Native

By Doug Bandow on 5.25.04 @ 12:05AM

(Page 3 of 3)

However, in February Chalabi essentially admitted that he had misled the Bush administration, not that the administration ever seemed much concern about resisting being misled. In an interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph, Chalabi declared: "We are heroes in error. 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."

Actually, it is. But then, Chalabi blames the people he was misleading: "Intelligence people are supposed to do a better job for their country, and their government did not do such a good job." In fact, he adds, "So why did the CIA believe [the defectors] so much?"

Chalabi's smugness pales in comparison to the possible illegality of the INC's activities. The General Accounting Office has opened an investigation into whether the INC violated U.S. law by using tax monies to push Washington to go to war. The INC grants prohibited activities "associated with, or that could appear to be associated with, attempting to influence the policies of the United States Government or Congress."

Yet that was Chalabi's central goal. Bruner observes: "His primary focus was to drag us into a war that Clinton didn't want to fight." Not surprisingly, in Bruner's view Chalabi "couldn't be trusted."

But then, legal norms never much constrained Chalabi. Set aside the bank charges. Three years ago the State Department found that hundreds of thousands of expenditures were inadequately documented or simply undocumented. So Chalabi as an intelligence asset was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency. As a result, complained one unnamed former intelligence officer to Newsweek, the Pentagon was "getting rolled like everyone else."

Yet after the war the DIA continued to pay the INC $340,000 a month for "intelligence collection." Although the New York Times reported that internal reviews by the DIA and the National Intelligence Council had concluded that the INC provided little information of value, the administration defended the continuing payments. Supposedly the U.S. received more useful information of late. Of course, since much of what the INC previously provided was false, this was not a difficult standard to meet. One official told the Los Angeles Times: "A huge amount of what was collected hasn't panned out. Some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated." Ken Pollack, a war supporter who once served in the CIA, notes that "Chalabi had a track record. We knew that this guy was not telling us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Finally, in mid-May the administration announced that it planned to kill the payments on June 30, only to cut them off last week.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WILDLY overstated the case for conquering Iraq and dramatically underestimated the difficulties that it would face in administering a conquered Iraq. No small blame goes to Chalabi. Observes Financial Times columnist John Dizard in a long expose in Salon, some neoconservatives "must be ruing the day they met Ahmed Chalabi, who told them the fairy tales they wanted to hear." In fact, all Americans should be ruing that day.

Chalabi still has his defenders, such as Richard Perle, who criticizes the CIA and State Department: "It is far from obvious how we advance American interests by acting against someone who shares our values and is highly effective." Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute suggests that the raid was "political manipulation in order to disable somebody who has been a thorn in the side of the CPA." Perle even theorizes that Chalabi could emerge from the episode "with great influence" and that "the crude nature of this action will actually have the reverse effect, and bolster Ahmed." Chalabi himself insists: "I am not marginalized."

Yet Chalabi's new-found independence cannot disguise the fact that he has always been a creature of Washington, not Iraq. As IGC president Sheik Ghazi Marshal Ajil al-Yawar observed, Chalabi and others "think they are entitled to a role because they believe they overthrew Saddam Hussein. It was the United States that overthrew Saddam while we were eating TV dinners." Alas, despite all of the money and trust invested in Ahmed Chalabi, he is, as Naser Al-Sane observed, one of America's biggest mistakes in Iraq.

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