There is a sobering, though also oddly encouraging article about Iraq in Saturday’s Washington Post — actually an odd mix of sobering and encouraging. The topic is the new Iraqi government now being planned and organized jointly by the US and the UN and the fact that the decision has been made to toss overboard most if not all of the folks we put on the Interim Governing Council.
At the top of the list of those to get the heave-ho is Ahmed Chalabi.
According to the article, the administration is seriously considering cutting off the amazingly ill-conceived $340,000 a month subsidy we still give Chalabi. Meanwhile, his role as head of the de-Baathification committee has just been publicly criticized by Paul Bremer.
Says the Post …
Chalabi has headed the committee in charge of removing former Baathist officials. In a nationwide address yesterday designed to promote national reconciliation, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer said complaints that the program is “unevenly and unjustly” administered are “legitimate” and that the overall program has been “poorly implemented.”
There is of course a larger issue at work here. Late in the game, the CPA is trying to reach out to some broad segment of the Sunni minority to invest them in the process of creating a new Iraqi state. And <$Ad$>that is a difficult, thorny task — which may necessitate drawing back from a more ambitious program of de-Baathifcation.
Still, putting Chalabi in charge of such an operation was always an egregious mistake. And it’s not hard to imagine he used the post to settle scores and advance his own personal interests, just as he did with his possession of much of the archives of the former regime’s secret police.
(As we’ve discussed previously, the US occupation authority acquisced in Chalabi’s seizure and continued possession of much of the archive of Saddam’s secret police, which he has used to blackmail his enemies both in Iraq and in the rest of the region. I’m even told that he’s using them to prepare a lawsuit against King Abdullah of Jordan, to be filed in US courts.)
In any case, the news seems to be Chalabi out the nearest air lock. And there’s some added details in there about his new scheming against UN representative Lakdar Brahimi, claiming Brahimi is an enemy of the Shia and so forth. Basically Chalabi continues to be a rogue and self-dealer and schemer and scammer till the end. As I said a while back (and not really in jest), the real question is whether we should take this man into custody now, while we are still the sovereign authority in the country, to ensure that he can be held to account for pocketing US taxpayer dollars and helping bamboozle the country into war with his phony intelligence findings.
There are still more than a few of the Chalabi crowd here in DC who persist in calling this charlatan the “Leader of Free Iraq”, as they did for last several years or ‘the greatest Arab since Mohammed’ as one of his acolytish handlers often refers to him. (Believe me, I’m not making this stuff up.) And those folks are after Brahimi, claiming that he is a creature of the Arab League and up to no good.
I know little about Brahimi and perhaps there are legitimate criticisms of him. But anyone who can help usher Chalabi out of the political process at least has one good thing to recommend him.
So ditching Chalabi is a good thing, and encouraging.
More sobering is the apparent decision to ditch most of the other folks involved in the Interim Governing Council. They’ll come up with some gentle way to frame the decision. But the bottom line seems clear: we’ve decided that the entire year-long experiment in building up the rudiments of a liberal Iraqi state have just been a wash and that it’s best just to start over from scratch. And when you think about it, that’s pretty terrible.
Ideally, you’d use the period of occupation to build up at least the nucleus of the institutions you’d want to see take root under full sovereignty. But the IGC, by all accounts and all the available polling data, is wildly unpopular in the country. And we hear more and more reports about its being laced with corruption, self-dealing and lots of other ridiculousness.
That’s not to say there aren’t many genuine democrats at work in the process who’ve tried to build the country up rather than exploit the situation for personal gain. Yet the overall reality seems pretty bad. And I suspect we’re only at the start of hearing all manner of horror stories about what’s really happened to much of the money we’ve poured into the place.
