Could it be, could it, that the U.S. attack on the portly fraud Ahmad Chalabi, will—intentionally or not—help Chalabi emerge as a hero in post-June 30 Iraq? Maybe not exactly, but there is more to the story than meets the eye. Certainly, Chalabi seems guilty of maintaining a secret relationship with the intelligence service of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and many news accounts report that Chalabi passed highly sensitive information to Iran that, CBS reports , could “get Americans killed.” That’s enough to get the CIA, which apparently led the raid against him, to hit him hard. But there is more. Let’s look at some of the pieces.
Two days ago, in this space, I quoted Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon liaison to Chalabi who is now settled back in at the American Enterprise Institute, saying this: "By telegraphing that he is not the favorite son of America, the administration will bolster him, showing he is his own man." Note: this was written by Rubin a few days before—yes, before—the raid on Chalabi’s offices.
Next there is this. In today’s New York Times , Richard Perle of AEI, Chalabi’s best friend in Washington, suggests that yesterday’s raid might actually help the lying Chalabi. Says Perle:
They have gone in recent days, at the CIA and the State Department, from saying he has no influence to a panic that he is really quite effective and could emerge with great influence. The crude nature of this action will actually have the reverse effect, and bolster Ahmad.
Ditto in today’s Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Chalabi Treatment,” which also suggests that by posing as anti-American Chalabi can gain:
We certainly think that Mr. Chalabi deserves the benefit of the doubt… With Mr. Brahimi [Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN envoy] like to freeze him out after June 30, Mr. Chalabi will be able to devote himself to building a party to run in the elections currently scheduled for January 2005. It’s no compliment to our work in Iraq that we have turned opposition to America into an Iraqi political asset.
As I've been reporting in this space for months, Chalabi has purposely been seeking to distance himself from Washington for a long time, fuming at this and that and trying to forge an alliance with the Shiite fundamentalists in southern Iraq—including the all-powerful (and all-backward) Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the scowly, bearded fatwa man. What Brahimi is doing is important, but even more important is what Sistani thinks about it. If Chalabi’s pugnacious, “let my people go” nonsense helps firm up an alliance with Sistani, then he will be back on top.
