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Blog of Adam Daifallah -- author, journalist, law student. Lover of politics, writing, golf, curling, fitness, fashion, bacon and maple products -- not necessarily (but probably) in that order. Partisan of the Anglosphere. Contact me via email at adam@daifallah.com. This summer I am joined by Keir Wilmut and Omar Soliman.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
While I was away ...
... I obviously missed a lot of important stuff. Most of it is stale news now, so no point in rehashing it.
But I would draw your attention this piece, which one well-placed Washington friend called "one of the best articles ever written about Ahmad Chalabi." If you care even the slightest bit about what's going on in Iraq, this article will interest you. The Wall Street Journal's Robert Pollock ventured to the troubled land and reports on how crucial Chalabi has become in Iraq.
A few choice bits:
"Very personally courageous," "not afraid to make decisions," and a "hugely important figure in Iraq" are among the phrases I heard U.S. officers apply to him (Chalabi) during two weeks I spent in the country earlier this month. Another sums up the stakes thus: "Chalabi is there to talk about protecting strategic infrastructure so they can sell oil so they can fund their own security-force development."
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The Chalabi treatment has confirmed that the CIA really can be as nasty and incompetent as its critics on the left used to claim. But what explains the gross political miscalculation by the Bush administration, which knew the CIA had major problems? Part of it, surely, has to do with influence of the foreign policy "realists," who didn't really believe in the regime-change mission and blamed Mr. Chalabi for luring the U.S. into Iraq. (The idea that Mr. Chalabi did so by passing faulty intelligence has been thoroughly discredited by the bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission.) Insofar as they had to go through the motions, the realists preferred Iraqi yes-men. "Get him back in his cage," Colin Powell is reported by the Washington Post to have demanded of Mr. Wolfowitz after Mr. Chalabi began pushing for the rapid restoration of sovereignty in late 2003. "I can't control him," Mr. Wolfowitz is said to have replied.
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Finally, there was the matter of last year's U.N.-led exit strategy. It isn't a coincidence that the attacks on Mr. Chalabi really heated up with arrival in Baghdad of U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi and a desperate play by the administration to foist responsibility for occupation on the international community. The trouble was, Mr. Chalabi had been busy showing that the U.N. had never really had Iraq's interests at heart. The Volcker Commission would likely never have been empanelled, and Oil for Food chief Benon Sevan's alleged corruption exposed, without the leads Mr. Chalabi provided based on information he obtained while serving as a member of the Governing Council.
Regular readers know the Chalabi story has been a longtime hobby horse. Great to see him continuing to confound his enemies -- in both Baghdad and Washington.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 2:23 PM
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