Posted on 03/24/2008 5:15:42 PM PDT by forkinsocket
The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi By Aram Roston Nation Books $27.50, 369 pages
What do the arch hawks of the Bush administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz, have in common with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard? Answer: they both fêted Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi banker who put “regime change” in Baghdad at the top of the US policy agenda.
In this biography, American investigative reporter Aram Roston says Chalabi and his organisations took millions from the US government, even as he continued to talk to Iranian intelligence services. While it uncovers no evidence that Iran ever paid him, he is unusual for being as welcome in the White House as he has been in Tehran.
Chalabi attracts adoration and enmity in equal measure and has courted controversy through his life, the outlines of which are reasonably well known. His Shia business family flees Iraq when the monarchy is overthrown in 1958. He studies mathematics at MIT and the University of Chicago. He establishes a bank in Amman that is taken over amid scandal in 1989 by the Jordanian authorities, leading to his conviction in absentia of fraud, which he denies. He creates the Iraqi National Congress to seek to oust Saddam Hussein and insinuates himself among hardliners in Washington. He gathers support for regime change, and his organisation encourages Iraqi defectors to tell western intelligence agencies and newspapers of Iraq’s programmes to build weapons of mass destruction, which the invasion discovers did not exist. Chalabi falls foul of the Bush administration and allies himself with some of its most violent opponents in Iraq.
Chalabi comes across here as a charismatic, Machiavellian individual, fascinated with the world of intelligence from the beginning. He moved the Washington establishment towards the invasion of Iraq but appears to have paid no thought about what to do afterwards, except that he wanted a central role.
There is much detail here about how he took tens of millions of dollars, first from the CIA, with whom he fell out; then from the State department, with whom he fell out; and then from the defence department, with whom he fell out. Government auditors struggled in vain to discover how this money was spent.
Chalabi often promised more than he delivered. He was to provide troops for the Free Iraqi Forces, which the Pentagon would train to enter Iraq. A training centre was established in Hungary, where 1,100 US soldiers and trainers waited, but Chalabi sent nobody. The programme cost an estimated $200m and the number of Iraqis trained was, in the words of the general who headed the programme, “teeny-tiny”.
Those who dislike him see nothing but personal ambition in Chalabi’s story. But this book suggests there was something else: the idea, that an exiled 13-year-old held in his mind for 45 years, of Iraq as a tolerant and increasingly prosperous society. This child’s view of his country was distorted even in 1958. By 2003, after a quarter-century of Saddam’s dictatorship, it bore almost no relation to reality.
Stephen Fidler is the FT’s defence and security editor
when will people learn to stop dreaming of freedom and prosperity?
Tsk tsk.
Mr. Fidler needs to do a little more fact-checking before he writes this sort of nonsense.
“Chalabi falls foul of the Bush administration and allies himself with some of its most violent opponents in Iraq.”
as much as chalabi is a failed individual, this charge - collusion with violent opponents (to the u.s.) in iraq - is a new one, as far as i have read, till now
apparently the investigation clearing Chalabi needs to be thrown out the window if you have an axe to grind
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