As the situation in Iraq staggers from crisis to crisis and the fog of war is thickened to impenetrability by barrages of self-serving accusations and counter accusations, lethally urged on and amplified by the treacherous anti-war brigade, a cool voice of reason in the Wall Street Journal questions the strange fate of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader who was once the darling of the Bush administration but who has now been brutally cast adrift as an alleged spy for Iran. Clearly, none of us can know whether this is true or not. But as the Journal points out, given the intelligence Chalabi provided which is said by the US military to have helped the US war effort and saved soldiers' lives, and given that Chalabi's aim of a secular, stable Iraqi government would not go down too well with Iran's mullahs, he does not seem an obvious Iranian plant. The Journal comments:

'We think Mr. Chalabi is a pawn in a much larger battle that is strategic, ideological and personal. On the first, he has long battled the CIA over the best way to topple Saddam. The Agency argued for, and tried to arrange, a coup that would leave most of the Baathist regime in place, and it predicted after the first Gulf War that Saddam would fall within two months. Mr. Chalabi correctly argued that Saddam's control was too tight and that only a U.S. invasion would succeed. He was wrong himself in overestimating how much Shiites would help in rebelling against Saddam, and clearly some of the INC's intelligence was mistaken. But then so was the CIA's; twice it told President Bush that Saddam had been killed and after both attempts Mr. Chalabi was correctly saying he was still alive. The man who told Mr. Bush that it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMD wasn't Mr. Chalabi; that source was CIA Director George Tenet.

'The ideological battle concerns Iraq's future governance. As a secular Shiite, Mr. Chalabi has sought to make an alliance with Grand Ayatollah Sistani and other moderate Shiite leaders. This puts him at odds with Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy to Iraq, as well as with the neighboring Arab leaders who are wary of control by the Shiite majority. Jordan's King Abdullah, a longtime Chalabi enemy who is close to Mr. Brahimi, has already called for another Sunni strongman to run Iraq. Mr. Bremer and the Bush Administration have handed control over the June 30 transition to Iraqi sovereignty to Mr. Brahimi, and one of his demands is that Mr. Chalabi be frozen out..All of this is to suggest that there are many people, in the U.N. and U.S. government, who were only too happy to see Mr. Chalabi humiliated in that raid and then trashed afterward. '

Who knows whether or not this is true? But wherever the truth lies, the Chalabi episode is a fiasco. As the Journal concludes:

'...the Chalabi fiasco is emblematic of the mistakes this White House has made in not deciding among its warring camps on Iraq policy, and in failing to exert any discipline on its factions at the CIA and the State Department that oppose Mr. Bush's policy.'

And that surely is the most alarming message from this whole episode -- that it illustrates in microcosm the failure by President Bush to get a grip on his administration. For in addition to the war in Iraq, he has been presiding over a battleground at home between factional enemies whose ideological divisions rival the tribal warlordism in Iraq itself, and who have not hesitated to brief against each other, score points, pass the buck, cover their own backs, mask their own incompetence, fight dirty and generally behave with all the treacherous malovolence one would expect of people who have more interest in saving their own skin than preventing their country from catastrophically losing a war and thus greatly increasing the peril for the west.

Which on present evidence looks an increasing possibility. One stands aghast.

Posted by melanie at May 26, 2004