Washington's tribes do battle over Iraq

New York Times (via IHT) ^ | Tuesday, May 25, 2004 | William Safire

[rmlew]

WASHINGTON: William Safire The three factions controlling Iraq - long suspicious of one another - are now on the brink of open tribal warfare. Not the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds - I mean the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA.

The spark setting off this U.S. bureaucratic conflagration is the former Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, a sophisticated, secular Shiite who organized resistance to the Sunni despot Saddam Hussein before it was popular.

Since 1996, the CIA has hated him with a passion. In that year, American spooks egged on Iraqi officers to overthrow Saddam. Chalabi claims to have warned that the plotters had been penetrated, and when the coup failed and a hundred heads rolled, he dared to blame the CIA for bloody ineptitude. This is at the root of his detestation by Tenet Co. and the agency's subsequent rejection of most Iraqi sources of intelligence offered by Chalabi's group.

Less personal is the State tribe's aversion. At Foggy Bottom, the State Department's headquarters, a policy of pre-emption and of regime change, urged by Chalabi, was always disdained. When Baghdad fell, Arabists at State were heavily influenced by the preference of Sunni leaders in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan for another Baathist Sunni strongman to be installed in Saddam's place for the sake of regional "stability" - despite the wishes of Iraq's Shiite majority and Kurdish minority.

The Pentagon, as we know, had a quite different view of America's mission. The Defense Department wanted to set up a democratic Iraq to cut off the incubation of terror in the Middle East. It found much of Chalabi's information, as well as his contacts in potentially meddlesome Iran, to be useful; indeed, as recently as last week, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, noted that intelligence supplied by him "saved soldiers' lives."

Into this internecine snicker-snack was injected Robert Blackwill, a tall academician-diplomat who is becoming a kind of Wilsonian Colonel House to President George W. Bush. His mission: Get America out as occupying power by the beginning of summer, and pass off the job of organizing the transition to elections to the UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi.

To accomplish this, Blackwill adopted a Lola policy: Whatever Brahimi wants, Brahimi gets.

The UN man, an Algerian who was a top official of the Arab League, wanted first to protect the Sunnis, the group that had profited most during Saddam's reign. To accommodate Brahimi, L. Paul Bremer 3rd was told to welcome more Baathists into power and U.S. military commanders were prevailed upon to back away from an attack on weapons-laden Falluja, heart of pro-Saddam insurgency.

Brahimi had another demand: Cut off Chalabi, who was not only complaining loudly about the end of de-Baathification, but had led the Governing Council to hire an accounting firm and lawyers to investigate the United Nations' complicity in the $5 billion oil-for-food kickback ripoff. On orders, Bremer shut down the Iraqi attempt to recover the stolen money. Accountants were hired who were more amenable to the United Nations.

Bremer then went all the way. He permitted Iraqi police to break into and trash Chalabi's political headquarters as well as his home, carting off computers and files, America's way of thanking him for helping craft Iraqi constitutional protections. Gleeful CIA operatives who accompanied the raid spread rumors that the troublesome Iraqi was a spy for Iran and a blackmailer of recipients of oil largess. True? Who knows? But his shattered picture made the cover of Newsweek, savagely labeled "our con man in Iraq."

Although the Defense Department is too battered by the prison scandal to stand up for anybody, Chalabi went on an array of Sunday morning television shows to demand a confrontation with the CIA's George Tenet before Congress and under oath. This agile pol sees how the Brahimi-Blackwill-Bremer blunderbuss can win him popularity with anti-Americans in Iraq.

Brahimi, satisfied, is compromising on the makeup of the group assigned to hold sovereignty (like a hot potato) until elections early next year. America's staunch Iraqi allies, the Kurds, may now not be frozen out.

Bob Blackwill, a dozen years ago, nicely updated a question conservatives asked about China a half-century before, telling me "There's the 'who lost Russia?' problem." To avert the same question about Iraq in the future, I'll be listening for a strong note of steadfastness in the president's speech Monday night.

[rmlew]

The Chalabi case is far from cut and dry.

[rmlew]

ping