Deception not only from Chalabi

The rise and fall of Ahmad Chalabi should send Americans a code red about the Bush administration’s botched war in Iraq.

Either Chalabi, an Iraqi exile during Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror and the darling of neocons from sea to shining sea, lied to U.S. officials about those infamously invisible WMD, mobile biological-weapons labs and Saddam’s supposed nuclear build-up in the mother of all power grabs — or President Bush, itching to finish off the war his father started a decade earlier, bought the lies knowingly.

To the tune of $340,000 a month for “valuable tactical intelligence” provided by Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress in exile as America prepared to invade Iraq on what has turned out to be “deliberately misleading” information, as Secretary of State Colin Powell now calls it.

Well, “poor” Chalabi’s payola has ended, his house raided last week by the U.S.-backed Coalition Provisional Authority, his papers and computer and even his holy Quran confiscated, and some of his INC people implicated in a sleazy plot to steal newly minted Iraqi money and government cars for themselves.

Then there’s the nefarious Iran connection.

Was Chalabi passing on U.S. secrets about the occupation to Iraq’s terrorist-recruiting neighbor, Iran? Or is that charge a “smear,” as Chalabi calls it, planted by CIA Director George Tenet, who never has trusted Chalabi and his exile group’s “intelligence” garnered from defectors of Saddam’s regime who couldn’t even pass a lie-detector test. News reports before the war indicated Powell, too, didn’t trust Chalabi’s sources.

But not to worry. The president’s main political man, Karl Rove, saw the electoral possibilities in a quickie war against a tyrant. Never mind if the tyrant wasn’t Osama bin Laden and didn’t have a connection with the 9-11 attacks. The “war president” wanted to believe that taking out Saddam would somehow bring Osama’s terrorists to their knees — and Americans to nod off for four more years. Except we’re now caught up in a war whose legitimacy is questionable — a war that has alienated more Arabs than it has won over and has created more terrorists.

Chalabi has become the easy scapegoat for the Bush people to blame their own bad calls. Leave 500,000 Iraqis in Saddam’s military without a job? Oh, that was Chalabi’s idea, Bush will tell you. Well, yes, it was, but the administration certainly didn’t have to go along with it. It could have kept the grunts who were in the military just to make ends meet, and earned their loyalty — sending the ones with blood on their hands to justice.

Chalabi, meanwhile, contends he gave no information to Iran, and that his fall from the all-knowing Bush’s grace is a Tenet-inspired vendetta orchestrated by Bush’s Man in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer. And maybe, just maybe, Chalabi’s right. Because nothing in this war has turned out to be like it seemed it would be. And everything has turned on how Bush can save his political skin in an election year.

Chalabi’s mistrust of U.N. Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi, a Sunni (like Saddam) Algerian brought in to find a transitional government for Iraq, adds another turn to this twisted tale. Could Bremer simply be abusing Chalabi — who has been the “source” for the embarrassing food-for-oil U.N. scandal — to make nicey-nice with the United Nations and move up the handover of this mess so that Bush can claim “victory” in Iraq before November?

It wouldn’t surprise me if the real plot isn’t to get Iraqis to rally around Chalabi in nationalistic fervor. Turned into America’s bad boy, Chalabi may end up the winner even as moderate Iraqis (and, yes, there are millions) lose any chance for true democracy.


Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Her e-mail address is mmarquez@orlandosentinel.com.