Chalabi's Fall From Grace.

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Chalabi's Fall From Grace.
2
Thu, 05-06-2004 - 2:24pm

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/subscriber/0,10987,1101040426-612365,00.html


Once upon a time, Ahmad Chalabi had friends in high places. The M.I.T.-educated Iraqi exile was the odds-on choice of a powerful coterie inside the Bush Administration to run Iraq once Saddam Hussein was gone. In the fall of 2002, well before the U.S. invaded, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith was trying to get Congress to release $97 million earmarked for groups, like Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), that were agitating for regime change. The Administration was relying on Chalabi's sources to provide intelligence on Saddam's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the State Department and the CIA persuaded the Senate Appropriations Committee not to release the money, arguing that Chalabi's intelligence wasn't worth paying for.


Nevertheless, with help from the top, Chalabi got his share of the money. In October 2002, at a meeting of President Bush's top aides, according to a former senior National Security Council official familiar with the session, Vice President Dick Cheney pushed forcefully for the payout, saying, "We are nickel-and-diming the I.N.C. when they are providing critical intelligence" on Iraq's WMD. Oversight of Chalabi's information operation was shifted from the skeptics at State to the Pentagon, where his champions included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.


For a while, those ties paid off. In April 2003, on the day Saddam's statue was toppled, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and his 600-man militia, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, into southern Iraq. Chalabi's operatives helped U.S. forces track down members of Saddam's regime and collect troves of valuable documents, and the U.S. rewarded him with a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council. But as U.S. stature in Iraq plummeted, so did Chalabi's fortunes. With Iraq's political future increasingly in the hands of the United Nations, Chalabi faces being cut out. U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi is said to dislike him, and U.N. sources say there will probably be no place for Chalabi in the appointed government taking control after June 30. Revelations that the I.N.C. provided the Administration with faulty prewar intelligence have forced even his former Pentagon pals to back away. Says a White House aide: "I'm not sure how many friends he has anymore."

Chalabi's fall from grace began the moment he arrived in Iraq. An exile for almost 46 of his 59 years, Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite, had no constituency inside the country. When the CIA refused to provide weapons to his ragtag band of mercenaries, the Pentagon armed them over the agency's objections. Within days of their arrival, some of Chalabi's forces claimed houses, buildings, document caches and vehicles in Baghdad that belonged to the former regime. Eventually the U.S. disarmed those members of the militia it could still track down. Among Iraqis, Chalabi, dogged by charges that he mishandled U.S. funds and convicted in absentia in 1991 of bank fraud in Jordan — he has always maintained his innocence — has failed to shake his image as a carpetbagger. Polls show that in spite of his efforts to ingratiate himself with powerful figures like Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, he remains the most mistrusted political figure in Iraq.

In Washington, Chalabi's light has dimmed as more and more experts like David Kay, former Bush chief weapons inspector, blame the I.N.C. for painting a bogus picture of Saddam's arsenal. Chalabi tells TIME, "It is unfair and astounding that I would be given such powers to affect a system. It's election season, and people want to seek scapegoats." But U.S. intelligence officials doubt the credibility of many of the sources provided by the I.N.C. An informant purported to have worked on underground storage sites for biochem weapons greatly "embroidered" his tales, a senior U.S. intelligence officer says. Another I.N.C. source provided corroborating reports that Saddam had mobile weapons labs, a charge Secretary of State Colin Powell presented before the U.N. in February 2003. Intelligence officials had red-flagged that source with a "fabricator notice," meaning the source was unreliable. The CIA says it missed the notice. Chalabi aides say he passed along the sources' information without vouching for it.

These days, Chalabi insists he harbors no grand political ambitions. "I have no desire to be a candidate for anything," he says. But Chalabi may try to make himself felt even if he is not named to the post-June government. He has positioned enough allies in Iraq's ministries to wield significant power behind the scenes. He is building a political machine for Iraq's elections, which are scheduled for next year. But if democracy does come, Chalabi's connections aren't likely to help him. "He's looking for a base of support," says Mahmoud Othman, a Kurd on the Governing Council. "But at this stage, anybody who wants to be elected needs to lobby for himself."

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Tue, 05-11-2004 - 9:48am

Another player. I admit I hadn't heard of this man before reading this piece on him.


Bernard Lewis


Seeking the Roots of Muslim Rage



http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2004/time100/scientists/100lewis.html


A few months after the attacks on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, several key Washington figures were invited to dinner at the Vice President's residence. The star turn was by an elderly professor from Princeton, whom Dick Cheney asked to conduct a seminar on Islam, the Koran and Muslim attitudes toward Americans. The teacher was Bernard Lewis, now 87, who first studied the Islamic world in his native London in the 1930s and — with a break spent serving in British intelligence during World War II — has been engaged in a life of scholarship ever since. But it is only in the past few years that the depth of Lewis' influence on key U.S. policymakers has become clear.


In a 1990 article in the Atlantic, Lewis identified the struggle between Islam and the West as a "clash of civilizations," long before the term was fashionable. The roots of Muslim rage, he argued, lay less in any evils of the West than in a "feeling of humiliation" in the Islamic world, deriving from the fact that Muslims' proud civilization had been "overtaken, overborne and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors." Once the the rage and failure of the Islamic world slipped out of their natural confines, as they did on Sept. 11, 2001, neoconservatives were able to argue that something dramatic was needed to ameliorate the threat to the West. Only transformation of the politics of the Islamic nations would suffice. Lewis — who is close to Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons' favorite Iraqi politician — became an advocate of intervention in Iraq in the hope of establishing a modern democracy there.

So the struggle in Iraq is as much a test of a theory as it is a war. For Lewis and the neoconservatives, the failure of Islam to reconcile itself to modernity is now too dangerous to leave alone. Moreover, they believe, the application of external force can be a catalyst for reform and peace. No scholar has had more influence than Lewis on the decision to wage war in Iraq. To what end, we don't yet know.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

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Registered: 05-02-2003
Tue, 05-11-2004 - 12:57pm
Ahmad Chalabi and his friends made many statements about Iraq and told many in the USA government that Iraq would be extremely gratefull to the USA if they rid the world of Saddam and peace would quickly follow with the people inside of Iraq because he has many friends in high positions inside Iraq who would work towards a new and democratic Iraq.


Unfortnately, for some strange reason, he was wrong and things went off course!

Hummmmm, I guess we all are still waiting for the peace that he and his friends promised?

This is why people have lost faith in him!