I was going to write a long rambling post about the whole Chalabi affair, but its late and I'm tired and you probably don't care that much anyway. After viewing Chalabi's interview today on Meet the Press and reading transcripts of some of the others, I'm pretty convinced that this whole thing is related to Chalabi's conducting the probe into the Oil-For-Food program, which may or may not implicate high-level people like Kofi Annan's son and even Iraqi envoy Lakhdar Brahimi himself. I'm thinking of writing up a piece on this.
I wish people would just take a step back for a moment, inhale, and remember what the point of all this is. The Bush administration (indeed, all of us who supported the war to liberate Iraq in the first place) should go back to first principles. The goal of this war was to remove a tyrant who was a security threat to the U.S., and to install a democracy in Iraq that could serve as a beacon of hope in the Arab world. That was the hope in Iraq and it should still be. But that goal is slipping away. The Bush administration, desperate to take the current mess away from John Kerry as an election issue, is trying to wash its hands of it by ceding control to the U.N.
It made no sense to raid Chalabi and publicly embarass him in this way. If the principle is to establish some kind of democratic regime, the U.S. ought to be propping up guys like Chalabi, not treating them like criminals. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress are the most Western-friendly, non-conventional Arab politicos in the world today. It is my view that America has made a big mistake in alienting a staunch ally like this.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 10:14 PM
