Chalabi is not the villain

Adam Daifallah

National Post

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Since the fall of Baghdad and the beginning of the ensuing guerrilla war, U.S. President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and the rest of America's war planners have all come in for vigorous criticism. But in recent months, it is an Iraqi who's stood at the centre of liberal cross-hairs.

That man is Ahmad Chalabi, the 59-year-old former Iraqi exile and leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a dissident group that opposed Saddam Hussein since its founding in Vienna in 1992. The conventional wisdom among bien-pensant journalists and commentators has come to be that Chalabi is a wily operator who somehow conned his Pentagon allies into invading Iraq, with the goal of eventually installing him as President. The thesis has recently been advanced in lengthy articles appearing in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine.

According to Pat Lang, a former Defence Intelligence Agency official, Chalabi is "a fake, one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people." If only the State Department had taken charge and Chalabi shunned, the theory goes, all the current trouble might have been avoided.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, Chalabi's ideas should have received a wider audience. A full year before the war began, the INC chief warned in an interview with The New York Sun that "substantial and significant" involvement of Iraqis in the war effort would be required and that American post-war planning was "abysmal" (which it was.)

Chalabi and other exiles had been working diligently for months to form a provisional government that would be ready to take the reigns of power as soon as possible after Saddam's fall. The plan was for newly-returned exiled leaders to create the nucleus of such an entity and to add so-called "internals" -- Iraqis who never left the country and lived through Saddam's terror -- as circumstances permitted. These leaders rightly felt that there should be no gap in Iraqi sovereignty, and therefore no pretext for a guerrilla war against Western "occupiers."

But this plan was kiboshed by U.S. officials. Realizing they'd made a mistake, the Americans have slowly come around to Chalabi's view since, and have accelerated the timetable for holding national elections and restoring full control of Iraq to Iraqis.

Chalabi has also been criticized for painting too rosy a post-war picture in an effort to make invasion seem a sure-fire gambit. An oft-repeated sound bite relates how the exiles predicted that invading troops would be welcomed with "sweets and flowers." (I know of only one Iraqi who has used this term, yet it is attributed to all). But as The New York Times reported Sunday, Chalabi and other prominent Iraqis warned months in advance that any political vacuum would invite security problems.

True, Chalabi wanted Saddam overthrown and pushed hard for that to happen by whatever means possible. But those who claim Chalabi provided torqued-up information about Saddam Hussein's weapons program should check the historical record. According to Chalabi himself, the Iraqi National Congress provided the United States with a total of three Iraqi defectors who provided weapons-related information. One was an engineer involved in building sites for weapons storage, one who knew of mobile weapons labs and a third who provided information about an isotope separation facility. That's all. The intelligence community was obviously speaking to scores of other Iraqis about WMDs above and beyond Chalabi.

More than anything else, the problems in Iraq today stem from a lack of co-ordination with and involvement of Iraqis. Only a few months before the war began, U.S. forces began training free Iraqis at a base in Hungary. The idea was to prepare these men for deployment alongside U.S. troops. But according to one report, fewer than 100 soldiers were actually trained before the first bomb was dropped.

One of the few victories Chalabi can claim is America's commitment to cleansing Iraq of Saddam Hussein's Baathist ideology and functionaries, including its entire Saddam-era military apparatus. Some have criticized this strategy, and argue that unemployed soldiers are the ones prosecuting the current terrorist war.

In the short term, they may be right. But just as de-Nazification was necessary for Germany to rehabilitate politically, so was de-Baathification needed to purge Iraq of the institutions connected to Saddam's reign of terror. When Iraq is rehabilitated and takes its place among the community of civilized nations, Chalabi will be vindicated.