The CIA Failure," by Thomas Powers, NYRB April 2004
The New York Review of Books: The Failure: "Volume 51, Number 7 � April 29, 2004

The Failure
By Thomas Powers
1.
This is a moment of crisis for the Central Intelligence Agency�the second in the half-century since it was established in 1948 primarily to serve the president. Directors of central intelligence are now confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, and they are required to report on their activities in a timely manner to the intelligence committees in Congress, but these gestures of oversight and restraint have not limited the power of presidents to use the CIA as they see fit. In past decades presidents have used the CIA to carry out acts of war against foreign nations, to attempt to assassinate foreign leaders, to raise funds in order to conduct secret wars, and even, in the notorious instance called Watergate, to attempt to quash the FBI's investigation of a White House�directed burglary team. The current crisis is the result of a White House�directed campaign to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by citing intelligence reports of Iraqi stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and accelerating programs to build more. But following the fall of Baghdad a CIA team more than a thousand-strong failed to find any WMD stockpiles, and the team's director, David Kay, concluded after six months of fieldwork that Iraq's research- and-development programs had been suspended or shut down years earlier.
This apparent failure of American intelligence is the subject of several ongoing investigations and is bound to be a matter of controversy for years to come. The failure is compounded by what Kay's team actually found� empty warehouses, idle factories and laboratories, as well as clear evidence that the regime in its last years had been corrupt, demoralized, and disintegrating. The CIA, it appear"
- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004

 
"The Disintegration of Palestine" by Edward Sheehan, NYRB April 2004
The New York Review of Books: The Disintegration of Palestine: Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004

The Disintegration of Palestine
By Edward R. F. Sheehan
1.
Nablus is a pleasing city, the most populous in the West Bank. A visitor is struck by the limestone dwellings on verdant mountainsides that surround the ancient town, first settled three millennia ago in the northern part of the West Bank. The city is now inhabited by nearly 200,000 Palestinians who are suffering badly from the Israeli occupation and the growing disintegration of their society.

Ghassan Shakah is the mayor of Nablus, a somewhat stout gentleman in his early sixties who studied law at the University of Alexandria and speaks perfect English. As a militant of the Palestine Liberation Organization, during the 1970s and 1980s he spent long periods in Israeli prisons where he lived on eggs. "Sometimes I was offered meat or fish, but it was rotten so I ate only eggs. For years after leaving jail I couldn't face an egg." Today as mayor he often meets with the Israeli commander of the Nablus district as he tries to relieve the misery of his people. The Israeli, he said, is "a colonel in a brown uniform but I don't even know his name. He's a nice guy, not at all arrogant, and he speaks perfect Arabic." The mayor reconstructed for me a recent conversation he had had with the colonel:

Mayor: Our people are suffering terribly. You destroy our electricity and water systems, we repair them with German and Norwegian money, and you destroy them again. We can't bear this collective punishment any longer.
Colonel: One third of the suicide bombings originate in Nablus. Yes, we're hurting you, but we've no other way to stop the terror.
Mayor: You've destroyed our police stations, and we have no police and no courts. You never mention the cause of all the trouble—your cruel occupation.
Colonel: Stop the terror.
Mayor: But I told you, we have no police in the streets. You've forbidden them to wear uniforms or to carry guns.
Colonel: Oh, that is a policy issue, so I have nothing to say. The occupation is a political decision, so I have nothing to say. As a soldier, I am here to obey orders.
Mayor: You are not only destroying our houses, but our economy and our culture.
The Israeli army originally entered Nablus in April 2002, and soon destroyed the muqata, headquarters of the district governor, and many other buildings. Since mid-December 2003, it has intensified its incursions, seeking suspected terrorists, militants of Hamas, and munitions makers. Using bulldozers, tanks, helicopters, and F-16 aircraft, the Israelis have destroyed or badly damaged two mosques, three churches, and hundreds of other buildings and homes.


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Walking through and near the old city I saw pharmacists' shops, insecticide factories, and pharmaceutical factories, all turned into heaps of rubble because they were said to be factories for guns and munitions. An entire city block that housed a soap factory has been leveled. I saw the rubble of a house, which supposedly sheltered a militant, that collapsed on ten adults and children, killing eight of them, according to Amnesty International, when the Israelis bulldozed it. I visited an elderly woman whose house was largely destroyed; its remaining room was used by the Israelis to imprison thirty-five youths for two days as they awaited interrogation. Schools, Palestinians told me, have been turned into interrogation centers.

Of late, the Israelis have been targeting various quarters of the city very late at night, kicking in doors and taking prisoners, but they still occasionally enter during the day. Israeli sharpshooters can sometimes be seen at their posts on hills and rooftops. On a street in the Balata refugee camp, where I met many undernourished children, a boy of six was eating a sandwich on his doorstep when a soldier shot him dead for no reason. So his uncle and other residents told me when I talked to them separately: they could not all have agreed on the same story if it was false. The Israeli army promised to investigate the killing, but so far has issued no findings.

Thousands of young and old have been interrogated and hundreds of young men have been indefinitely detained, Mayor Shakah said. Nablus is sealed at several established exits from the city as well as at "mobile checkpoints" that are quickly set up by the Israeli soldiers; for citizens to pass in or out has become very difficult. Most businesses have ceased to function, unemployment exceeds 70 percent, and without police there is no enforcement of law and order.

Mayor Shakah's brother was recently murdered by a rogue faction of Fatah, and the gunmen narrowly missed the mayor himself. As repression by the Israeli army and security services continues, popular support for Hamas rises and the Palestinian Authority's control disintegrates. The mayor and governor have tried to resolve quarrels among different factions through unarmed citizens' committees; but many, possibly dozens, of suspected collaborators with the Israelis have been summarily killed by vigilantes. Such fragile security is similar throughout much of the West Bank as the Israeli army moves in and out and the Palestinian Authority becomes more and more impotent. Violence flares up sporadically, adding to the death toll already inflicted by the Israelis. In March, beset by the occupation, armed hoodlums in the streets, and pressures within the PA, Mayor Shakah was threatening to resign.


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I left Nablus on the road to Qalandiya, about twenty miles to the south. At a junction soldiers at a mobile checkpoint suddenly appeared, and my shuttle taxi was ordered to stop. In it with me were the Palestinian driver, two other men, an adolescent boy, two elderly women in traditional dress, and a beautiful young woman without a head scarf. An Israeli soldier with a pistol advanced on us, ordering us out of the car, followed by another soldier with an assault rifle pointed at our heads, the first soldier shouting at us in Hebrew to bare our stomachs, backs, and chests.

The men obeyed instantly. The elderly women remained in the car; the young woman stepped fearfully aside, refusing to bare her stomach, a sacrilege for Islam, and though the soldiers shouted they did not touch her. The first soldier checked all our identity cards; he screamed at me to take off my Boston Red Sox cap, and then returned to his armored car to run my US passport through a computer. Two days before, a Palestinian woman had blown herself up in the Gaza Strip with explosives strapped around her waist, killing four Israelis and wounding several Arabs.

Suicide bombings have killed or wounded dozens of Israelis since January 2004. The recent pitched battles between Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in which dozens of Arabs have died, and the suicide bombing in the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-March, which killed ten Israelis, showed an alarming escalation of violence on both sides. Then, on March 22, an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Islamist group Hamas, sending a torrent of anger through the Arab world and provoking condemnation by Britain, the European Union, and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The milder reaction in Washington (the assassination was "deeply troubling," said the State Department) reinforced Palestinian suspicions that the Bush administration had acquiesced in the assassination and evoked demands from Hamas militants for more terror not only against Israel but now against the United States.

But when our group set out again for Qalandiya, the Palestinians with me were silent. Were they resigned to such humiliation, or was their anger so deep that they could no longer express it?

2.
Does the Geneva Accord signed last December still offer any hope for peace? The fifty-three-page document —negotiated for more than two years by two teams of dovish Israelis and Palestinians—incorporates many of the proposals made by President Clinton at Camp David and elaborated at Taba three years ago.

According to the Geneva Accord, the PLO would formally recognize Israel as a Jewish state and simultaneously create a demilitarized Palestinian state, each maintaining its capital in West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem respectively; with only small exceptions, Israel would withdraw to its pre-1967 borders, i.e., from all of the Gaza Strip and nearly 98 percent of the West Bank, compensating the Palestinians for the remaining 2 percent with a land grant abutting the Gaza Strip; Israel would cede sovereignty to the Palestinians over the Temple Mount–Noble Sanctuary in East Jerusalem, while retaining sovereignty over the Western (Wailing) Wall; Palestinian political prisoners would be released in stages. Palestinian refugees or their heirs would largely relinquish their "right of return" to their lost property inside Israel but could receive compensation for it. Any repatriations would be subject to "the sovereign discretion of Israel."[1]

The negotiating teams were headed by Yossi Beilin, a justice minister in the last Labor government, and by Yasser Abed Rabbo, a veteran Palestinian militant and cabinet minister, who has been close to President Yasser Arafat. But the details of the accord were worked out mostly by small groups that were expanded at various stages. The original drafts were written in Switzerland by Daniel Levy, an adviser to Beilin, and Ghaith al-Omari, an adviser to Rabbo, with occasional help from Robert Malley, a former assistant to President Clinton on the National Security Council staff.

Dr. Menachem Klein belonged to the inner negotiating circle. An eminent academic and adviser to Beilin and an expert on Jerusalem, he told me that "as legal experts, Daniel Levy and Ghaith al-Omari not only wrote the original drafts, they kept refining the language in the ongoing drafts that we other members finally approved...."

Security and territorial issues were negotiated on the Israeli side by retired Major General Amnon Shahak, a former army chief of staff, and on the Palestinian side by General Zuhair Manasra, former commander of the Preventive Security Service on the West Bank, and by other experts. David Kimche, former deputy head of Mossad (the Israeli CIA) and then director general of the foreign ministry, attended the last session and helped to refine the text. His participation, I was told, was crucial in persuading the Palestinians not to insist on any reference to the "right of return" of refugees to Israel in the final accord. Kimche came with the support of four former heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli FBI, who believe that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza harms Israel. The hardest issues were territorial, the division of Jerusalem, and the Palestinian right of return. Dr. Klein said,

In any final peace agreement many details must be negotiated, but I predict that 90 percent of the final deal will duplicate the Geneva Accord. It's not a perfect document; it's a package of compromises. A unitary binational state, comprising Jews and Arabs, is a delusion. Most Israelis want a Jewish state. On the other hand, an apartheid regime—Prime Minister Sharon's unilateral project of withdrawing from some areas and enclosing the Palestinians behind walls and fences—will inevitably lead to more opposition from abroad, a Palestinian revolt, and failure. Sharon won't admit the limits of force, but Palestine can't digest his project, and eventually both he and Arafat will realize that the only choice is Geneva.
Abed Rabbo is less optimistic. "I don't know whether the initiative will succeed," he told me in Ramallah:

We'll keep trying. I want the United States to be involved under the "road map" and consider the Geneva Accord to be the embodiment of the third phase of the road map—a final Palestinian state. I'm against any provisional borders. We want to go straight to the final phase. We think that interim solutions cannot succeed. The chief virtue of our plan is its clarity—it's comprehensive and without ambiguity.
Nor do I know the chances of influencing Washington before the presidential election. The US is giving Sharon every opportunity to complete building the wall and to annex new areas in the West Bank. This compromises the alleged US aims in the Middle East—stability and democracy—and may create a new scenario of violence. Why wait? Let's engage in crisis prevention instead of crisis management.

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Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has scornfully dismissed the Geneva Accord as a suicide pact for Israel and a "Swiss golden calf" for worship by the Israeli left. Abed Rabbo went to Geneva with President Arafat's unofficial encouragement. During the final stages Mohammed Hourani, a leader of Fatah Tanzim, the militant Palestinian activists, joined the negotiations; his participation was intended to legitimize the process for the broader Palestinian public and was crucial to the accord's being completed. In Ramallah, Ghaith al-Omari, Abed Rabbo's young chief adviser, who has law degrees from Georgetown and Oxford, told me, "We know that it's not possible to convince Sharon, who says that he has no Palestinian partner with whom to negotiate, but we want to prove to the Israeli public that they can have a Palestinian partner capable of practical solutions." Polls indicate that so far between a third and 40 percent of the Israeli public support the Geneva Accord.

Al-Omari and his associates argue that the accord signifies a new and realistic approach for the Palestinians to follow. Many Palestinians had clung to the old fantasy of liberating all of Palestine, eliminating Israel, and allowing a huge return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland. The new plan looks not backward but forward, relinquishing absolute justice (a large-scale return) in favor of self-determination and independence in a state that would constitute 22 percent of historic Palestine. Al-Omari said, "There is no going back to Haifa."

Polls suggest that most Palestinians would accept financial compensation for their lost property in Israel, but the "right of return" remains a matter of deep conviction to many Palestinians who cannot be described as radicals. For example, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is a widely respected secular physician in Ramallah, a political activist committed to peaceful tactics, and a harsh critic of Arafat. The head of a large organization concerned with public health, he aspires to be president of Palestine after democratic elections. He dismisses the Geneva Accord not only for its failure to address the refugee problem fairly but for failing to envision a real Palestinian republic. "The Geneva Accord offers us functional governance but not a sovereign nation," Barghouthi told me in Ramallah. He objects to the provisions for security by which "Israel would remain in control of our borders and airspace." He wants the Palestinian state to have an armed force sufficient for self-defense and to have command over its airspace.

It is clear from the text of the Geneva Accord that Israel would limit repatriated Palestinians to at most the tens of thousands, whereas many moderate Palestinians still aspire to repatriate hundreds of thousands. Palestinians such as Abed Rabbo respond that such dreams of return can be the subject of poetry, but not of politics. Menachem Klein told me in Jerusalem, "It's not our business what the Palestinians dream, but it is our business to prevent our demographic nightmares from coming true." The demographic nightmare is also clear. If Israel holds on to the Occupied Territories, Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis within the next five years. One sees this prediction referred to often in the Israeli press.

3.
Shin Bet, the internal Israeli intelligence service, is generally considered more liberal than the army in its attitudes toward the Occupied Territories. Four former heads of Shin Bet—Ami Ayalon, Yaakov Perry, Avraham Shalom, and Carmi Gilon—complained publicly in November that by pursuing Sharon's hard line against the Palestinians, "Israelis are taking sure, steady steps to a place where Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people." Ayalon added, "Many Israelis thought we could defeat the Palestinians by military means ...but this hasn't worked." Senior analysts of Shin Bet, familiar with the wretched conditions inside the territories, are known to share this view and to favor an easing or even an end to the occupation.

But Shin Bet officers working in the occupied towns continue to enforce Sharon's harsh policies. The agency runs an enormous network of Palestinian informers throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It hands out favors, money, and work permits in Israel, and uses threats and blackmail to collect information about suicide bombers and other real or perceived dangers to Israel's security. The Shin Bet computers are so sophisticated that even bits and pieces of intercepted cell phone conversations can be collated in a central database to suggest patterns of future terrorist activity and to identify the militants involved.

When Palestinians complain of torture, moreover, they mainly accuse the Shin Bet. At Bir Zeit University outside Ramallah, which has been periodically closed by the army and is now subjected to other forms of harassment, I met two Palestinian science students, both about twenty. With close-cropped hair and short black beards, they struck me as resembling the young Islamists I'd met on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. They had, they said, been interrogated and imprisoned by the "Shebbak," as they called the Shin Bet. "Mohammed" from Hebron told me, "I was arrested for no reason, not informed of the suspicions against me, and held by the Shebbak under 'administrative detention'":

I was first held at Ofer, the detention center near Ramallah. In the beginning, for two or three months, I was interrogated, kept in solitary confinement, deprived of sleep, and beaten. My hands were bound above my head and I was suspended from the ceiling; cold water, then hot water, was thrown on my naked body.... My genitals were beaten and they shook me strongly.... It was all torture. The interrogators asked me, "Why are you fighting the occupation? Do you belong to Hamas?" I answered, "I am only a student at Bir Zeit." I was held for twelve months and allowed no communication with my family.
"Mahmoud," the other student, said that his treatment under interrogation was similar to Mohammed's:

I wasn't informed of the accusations and never told my rights. After twelve days of detention I saw a lawyer for five minutes but he didn't even know my name. On no evidence, a judge in uniform ordered my detention for four months....
They interrogated me about the intifada, weapons, my computer. They said, "We know you went to Jordan at such and such a date." They asked me about my family, school, social issues, my mother, and my house. Like Mohammed here, I was shifted around—psychological pressure, being moved suddenly from one prison to another, each place worse and smellier than the last, made to get up in the middle of the night and sit on the ground to be counted, made to eat in the toilet, denied access to the toilet, crowded into a small cell with a dozen men, denied contact with my family. The prisons inside Israel, in the Negev desert, were the worst. We were fed only ful, crushed brown beans, causing terrible constipation. The rats were as big as cats. The medical care was a joke, and several men died there.
Jessica Montell, executive director of B'Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights group, estimated the current number of political or "security" prisoners at nearly six thousand. From her reports of recent treatment of prisoners, she questioned whether Mohammed and Mahmoud had been tortured in the ways they claimed. In 1999 the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed severe physical force, allowing torture only in "exceptional" cases. "Shin Bet is very disciplined in its interrogation procedures," Montell told me in Jerusalem. "There are limits to the number of times a prisoner can be shaken. Shaking is not standard. Beating is not standard." Still, aside from the claims of torture she found the accounts of Mohammed and Mahmoud to be "basically plausible."

Other liberal Israelis I spoke to who were familiar with the detention system dismissed her reservations. They insisted that since the current inti-fada started, the high court's ruling has not been enforced, no torturers have been punished, and the interrogations continue to be brutal. Palestinian human rights groups claim that torture of prisoners is common, and Amnesty International has made similar accusations.[2]


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Article 15 of the Geneva Accord signed last December provides for the release of all political prisoners, some immediately upon the signature of a peace treaty, others within eighteen months, and "exceptional cases" within thirty months of Israel's final territorial withdrawals. "Obvious terrorists will be released within thirty months," one of Abed Rabbo's close associates told me in Ramallah:

The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland is the most important precedent because its prisoner model is the most relevant to us. Israeli torturers will be absolved like Palestinian terrorists. We don't preclude civil lawsuits against individuals, but we want a clean slate—since the chief objective is to end the conflict and start a new narrative.
4.
The breakdown of civil order and social services I saw in Nablus is repeated in lesser or greater degree in Jenin, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Hebron, the Gaza Strip, and elsewhere. The Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid wrote recently in Haaretz of what he called "the reign of the thugs." He complained that Ahmed Qureia, the current Palestinian prime minister, and Hakam Balawi, the current interior minister, are ineffectual in providing even basic security to Palestinians. In Tulkarm, he said, "the Al Aqsa Brigades direct and manage the city's civil and security life. They threaten, beat, and kill." Both the security services and the civil administration of the Palestinian Authority seem impotent. When several of Arafat's ministers visited Jenin last spring but brought with them no supplies of food or offers of employment, the people threw stones at them.

More and more, control of the Palestinian streets is passing to Hamas, the radical Islamist group which is responsible for many suicide bombings but also has close ties to many Palestinians through its network of schools, clinics, and aid to the hungry. Where the PA is flabby, Hamas is robust; where the PA is disorganized, Hamas is disciplined; where the PA is corrupt, the leaders of Hamas live austerely.

Haaretz recently commented on the "vigorous election process" taking place in institutions maintained by the more educated Palestinians—universities, professional associations, and commercial agencies. These elections, the newspaper said, are the "sole barometer of the mood among Palestinians" and show clearly the rising power of Hamas not only in Gaza (where it has long been strong) but throughout the West Bank. At Bir Zeit University, a coalition of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad won twenty-five of fifty-one seats in elections for the student union; Arafat's Fatah got twenty seats. Hamas and the Jihad are now in complete control of the Polytechnic– Palestine University in Hebron and An-Najah University in Nablus. They dominate the engineers' association and other important groups throughout the territories.

Despite allegations of large amounts of money held by Arafat, some of it reportedly passed on to his wife in Paris, the Palestinian Authority is said to be nearly bankrupt, and I often heard from Palestinians that it may soon become insolvent. The election results I have cited, however, do not mean that many Palestinian professionals favor the adoption of the sharia law and other Islamic tenets of Hamas in a future government. What the elections imply is that Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are losing control and many Palestinians are willing to recognize the political and social power of groups such as Hamas. The European Union, the United States, and other donor countries and agencies, weary of pouring money into what they perceive as the corrupt, bottomless treasury of the Palestinian Authority, are threatening to reduce or cut off their subsidies—about $430 million annually from the EU alone. Soon the PA may not even be able to pay the salaries of the 130,000 civil servants in its bloated bureaucracy.

Yet many such difficulties are also directly the result of Israel's punitive policies. Palestinian and Israeli economists alike attribute much of the PA's penury to the huge economic disruptions caused by Sharon's separation fence, which prevents many Palestinians from getting to their land and places of work, and to the closures, curfews, collective punishment, checkpoints, barricades, and the demolition of infrastructure inflicted on the population since the al-Aqsa Intifada began in September 2000.[3]

In Ramallah, one of the PA officials close to Arafat told me that although Arafat has unofficially endorsed the Geneva Accord, he has despaired of a political solution and a Palestinian state in his lifetime: "Yasser Abed Rabbo and the other Palestinians of Geneva are his men, but as usual, Arafat is thinking on both sides of the street. With the rise of Hamas and the disintegration of the PA, he now foresees a 'Lebanonization' of the conflict such as happened when the Druse forces of Walid Jumblat battled the Christian Phalange within Lebanon. Hamas will be fighting the PA and we will all be fighting Israel."

Strategically, Israel made a big mistake when it destroyed the PA's security forces and, with it, Arafat's capacity to move against Hamas. Now he can't send his police forces anywhere. He didn't order the suicide bombings but he didn't stop them. He didn't make use of security forces because he has no security forces. But he wasn't all that unhappy with the suicide bombings—it's now the only real form of resistance.
This well-known Palestinian went on to predict that the summer of 2004 will produce a major explosion in both Palestine and Iraq, with the possible support of Syria and Iran. "I don't say that it will be directly coordinated, but all these elements will work to defeat Bush in the elections. We might," he said, see something resembling what happened in Somalia happen in Iraq. And yet, if a peace deal with Israel is ever reached, "it will have to be with Arafat. Only he could do it. Only he could resolve the problem of the right of return"—by convincing the Palestinians that relatively few would ever go back to Israel and that compensation would be adequate.


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No matter what the Palestinians do or the United States says, the Sharon government will continue to carry out its plan to complete the separation fence within eighteen months, seizing additional portions of the West Bank. Meanwhile the hopes of last summer for a negotiated settlement fade as the Bush White House, distracted by Iraq, and seeking votes at home, has put aside the road map in order to please American evangelicals and the Israeli lobby. Only Sharon's project moves forward.

It might seem that Sharon has been set back by the scandal in which he and his sons are accused of accepting bribes, in part to finance his political campaigns, but so far he has managed to delay an indictment. He has seemed to change his rhetoric by saying he intends to evacuate most of the Gaza Strip and to modify the fence to reduce Palestinian suffering. Some minor alterations of the fence are being made —for example, it has been shortened and moved closer to the "Green Line" (the 1967 border) in the area near Jenin. Sharon may be serious about evacuating Gaza eventually (although there is talk of the Gaza settlers being moved to the West Bank). His aides have undertaken complicated discussions with Washington about such a unilateral withdrawal. But he faces fierce opposition from Israeli settlers in Gaza and from members of his own government. Skeptical Israeli analysts suspect him of playing more tactical games in order to mislead the Israeli public and humor the United States.

Sharon's master plan, as revealed in many articles in the Israeli press, is to create three Palestinian cantons—to the north of Jerusalem, to the south of Jerusalem, and the third (very small) around Jericho near the Jordan River. Another fence, not yet approved by his cabinet or the Knesset, would cordon off for Israel a large swath of eastern Palestine mostly in the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians already call the cantons Bantustans; Sharon will call them a Palestinian state.

5.
As the Arab population throughout historical Palestine rises toward parity with Jews within several years, pressures in Israel may mount to "transfer" Palestinians to other countries, notably to Jordan. This is already the platform of Benny Alon of the National Union (settlers') Party, which Alon represents in Sharon's cabinet as minister of tourism. A policy of "soft" transfer already can be said to be in effect—internal displacement of thousands of Palestinians by the fence, deportations to Gaza, administrative pressure, and the imposition of sheer misery on West Bank Palestinians to make them leave the territories permanently. Some of the Israelis I talked to suspect—they have no solid evidence—that when the fence is finished, a policy of "hard" or forcible transfer might follow. The Jordanians, with whom Israel has a peace treaty, are alarmed by the fence because it might increase demographic pressure on Jordan; they fear that Sharon will eventually begin to dump Palestinians on the east bank of the Jordan River despite the peace treaty.

Indeed, according to Jane's Foreign Report, King Abdullah II of Jordan told Sharon at a recent meeting at Sharon's ranch in Israel that "he thought the Israeli prime minister was trying to make the Palestinians abandon their homes, cross the Jordan River and settle on its east bank—in Jordanian territory. Such an action, King Abdullah added, would seriously destabilize the Hashemite kingdom, where the majority of the four-million-strong population are Palestinians."[4]

Moreover, the recent interview of Benny Morris in Haaretz has alarmed many Palestinians, who fear that it foreshadows official Israeli policy. Morris, the leading Israeli revisionist historian, showed from documentary evidence that Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and that most of them did not (as Israel has alleged) leave voluntarily. He now justifies this "ethnic cleansing" as necessary to the establishment of a Jewish state and predicts that it may be necessary again.[5] Ilan Pappe, another prominent Israeli revisionist historian who teaches at Haifa University and has written extensively in books and articles about the expulsion of the Arabs in 1948, told me: "I know Benny Morris, and I'm not surprised. It's worrying that he thinks his views are now acceptable in Israel. In the past, people would never dare to express such views, but now they do. The idea of 'transfer' is moving from the extreme margins to the center."

Drawing on his reading of Israeli history, Pappe spelled out a possible future. The Israeli–Jordanian peace treaty, signed in 1994, would not stop a "hard" transfer into Jordan. Among the first victims might be the Palestinians pushed off their land by the fences—maybe 150,000 to 200,000 people. Pappe suspects that the government may already have a provisional plan for a systematic "ethnic cleansing." But, he said, it would need a pretext for carrying out such a policy—"a mega terror attack," for example. The government might make a declaration that warned Palestinians to move from the West Bank within a week or two; if they didn't, they'd be expelled. It's unlikely that the government would ask the US to acquiesce in such a policy, but aside from strong rhetoric what serious action would the US and the rest of the world undertake? "The transfer might be justified as necessary in 'the war on terror,'" Pappe said. "It's a risk, but the Israeli leaders would weigh the risk." Palestinians I talked to swore that should Israel try to expel them, they will not repeat their mistakes of 1948: "They will have to line us up against the walls and shoot us—we're not leaving."


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It has been reported from Washington that President Bush (if reelected) will act more decisively to enforce his road map after the November polls. He may not have time. His mild reproaches of Sharon's policies have not worked; the Palestinian people may be veering toward a general revolt—a danger made perhaps more likely by the recent assassination of Sheikh Yassin. The only sensible course would be a vigorous American endorsement of the Geneva Accord as a supplement to the road map, to be negotiated between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority, with refinements and improvements, within the next six months.

Is this suggestion realistic? Is it inconceivable to make real the language of the Geneva Accord—that Israelis and Palestinians will "establish relations based on cooperation and the commitment to live side by side as good neighbors, aiming both separately and jointly to contribute to the well being of their peoples"? Nearly everything one sees in the Occupied Territories casts doubt on this vision. Only the fact of the accord itself having been negotiated and signed offers a glimpse of hope.

—Jerusalem, March 31, 2004

Notes
[1] For the full text of the Geneva Accord, see www.monde-diplomatique.fr /cahier/proche-orient/a10414 or www.informationclearinghouse.info/article- 5019.hfm.

[2] See Amnesty International, Briefing for the Committee Against Torture, May 14, 2002, AI Index: MDE 15/075/ 2002, MDE 15/074/2002, and "Mass Arrests, Detention, and Torture or Ill-Treatment of Palestinians," AI Report 2003; and The Palestine Monitor at www.palestinemonitor.org. The US State Department's human rights reports have also sternly criticized Israel's detention policies and occupation policies generally. See the reports of March 2003 and February 2004 at www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt. The 2004 report also said that the Palestinian Authority's overall human rights record "remained poor" and that it continued to commit "numerous, serious abuses."

[3] For further details on the PA's difficulties and the rise of Hamas, see Arnon Regular, "Paralyzed PA Looks Out on a Bitter Cold Street," Haaretz, January 1, 2004; and Danny Rubinstein, "The PA's Terrible Economic Plight Will Worsen," Haaretz, January 18, 2004.

[4] See "Jordan's King Doubts Sharon," Jane's Foreign Report, March 25, 2004, at www.foreignreport.com.

[5] For the Morris interview, the torrential response from readers, and Morris's counter-response, see Haaretz magazine for January 9, 16, and 25, 2004. See also the exchange between Morris and Henry Siegman in the April 8, 2004, issue of The New York Review, in reply to Siegman's article in the March 25 issue.

- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004

 
Against all Enemies by Richard Clarke, reviewed by Urquhart in NYRB May 2004
The New York Review of Books: A Matter of Truth
Volume 51, Number 8 · May 13, 2004
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Review
A Matter of Truth
By Brian Urquhart
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
by Richard A. Clarke
Free Press, 304 pp., $27.00

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States Staff Statements Nos. 1-8
www.9-11commission.gov
1.
During an election year in Washington, there is no such thing as an election-free statement. This phenomenon has reached a climax of sorts with the publication of Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke's account of his ten years as the country's leading counterterrorism coordinator. The hostile reaction of the administration has boosted his book to the top of the national best-seller list and made it a leading news story. The coincidence of its publication with the public testimony of Clarke and others before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States has been denounced as a shameless act of commercial and personal self-promotion. (Clarke maintains that his hope that the book would be published before Christmas 2003 was dashed by the White House taking so long to clear it for security.) There have been welcome moments of farce during this furor, as when the vice-president kicked the ball into his own team's goal by stating that Clarke, the administration's ranking expert on counter-terrorism, "wasn't in the loop" much of the time. This assertion had to be hurriedly corrected by the national security adviser.

Most of the reaction was, and is, directed at Clarke's allegations of the Bush administration's inattention to the al-Qaeda threat in the months before September 11. The task of rebutting this story has been made more difficult by President Bush's own frank comment about the al-Qaeda threat, quoted in Bob Woodward's Bush at War (2002), that "I was not on point... I didn't feel that sense of urgency. My blood was not nearly as boiling."[1] Accounts of the Bush administration's early indifference to the imminent threat of al-Qaeda have already been published in a number of books and in the press.[2] What is different about Clarke is that, in the fight against terrorism, he was the ultimate insider with a formidable reputation for dedication, drive, and effectiveness. Clarke's other stinging criticism of the Bush administration, his denunciation of the Iraq war as a gross and extremely costly strategic error, must have hit an even more sensitive nerve in a White House that cannot admit either question or error. It is a criticism that gets more difficult to answer every day.

It would be a pity if this Washington firestorm were to lead people to conclude that Clarke's book is simply another Bush-bashing exercise and that there is therefore no need to read it. (The Bush administration makes its full appearance only on page 227 of a three-hundred-page book.) Against All Enemies is a highly readable, often exciting, and authoritative account of America's most dangerous immediate problem, how to deal with terrorism and al-Qaeda. It is also the story of one man's effort to make the complex bureaucracy of the federal government respond to undefined but devastating threats as well as to unforeseen emergencies. It is an important book.

2.
Richard Clarke made his way from a working-class family in Boston, through the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, to government service, in which he rose to the highest ranks of the policymaking world in Washington. Starting as an intelligence analyst in the Pentagon, he became, at the age of thirty-four, the deputy chief of intelligence and research at the State Department. In 1992, after an argument with Secretary of State James Baker, he was assigned to the National Security Council staff, where he became the acknowledged national expert and leader on terrorism and counterterrorism. In 1998, Clinton appointed him as coordinator of counterterrorism with a seat at the cabinet table. Considering that he is currently being accused of grandstanding, self-aggrandizement, and self-importance, it is striking that Clarke's name was virtually unknown to the public until very recently.

In Washington Clarke assumed none of the easygoing and affable airs and graces of a grandee in the capital. He was tough, outspoken, arrogant, and abrasive and had no desire to be liked. Indeed without these qualities it is difficult to see how he could again and again have cut through the jungle of the federal bureaucracy to achieve effective responses to the new and appalling threat of global, ideological, suicide terrorism.

Even the authors of the excellent Staff Statements of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks feel the need to devote a paragraph to Clarke's unusual personality, tactics, and skill:

Clarke was a controversial figure. A career civil servant, he drew wide praise as someone who called early and consistent attention to the seriousness of the terrorism danger. A skilled operator of the levers of government, he energetically worked the system to address vulnerabilities and combat terrorists.... Some officials told us that Clarke had sometimes misled them about presidential decisions or interfered in their chain of command. National Security Adviser Berger told us that several of his colleagues had wanted Clarke fired. But Berger's net assessment was that Clarke fulfilled an important role in pushing the interagency process to fight Bin Laden. As Berger put it, "I wanted a pile driver."[3]
According to Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Age of Sacred Terror, "This time Dick has gone too far," was a frequent refrain in the offices of the Clinton National Security Council.


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Benjamin and Simon ascribe Clarke's effectiveness to three principal characteristics. He had a deep understanding of "all the levers and pulleys of foreign policy," of what could be done and how to do it. He was relentless, and many of his senior colleagues

shook their heads as he overplayed his hand in bureaucratic battles and needlessly alienated people who might have helped him. But...he delivered considerably more than most. Third, Clarke had a preternatural gift for spotting emerging issues.[4]
During the Clinton administration the new shape and nature of international terrorism began to emerge. Clinton reacted to government-sponsored terrorism in a way that effectively discouraged further terrorist acts. In response to Iraq's attempt to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush during a 1993 visit to Kuwait, Saddam's intelligence headquarters in Baghdad was destroyed by cruise missiles. During the same year, however, the bombing of the World Trade Center was not immediately linked to a Saudi veteran of anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan called Osama bin Laden. Nor was bin Laden linked with the unwelcome presence during the war in Bosnia of a force of foreign Islamic militants, or with some terrorist operations that were thwarted, like the plan to bomb US airliners in the Pacific or to attack New York landmarks, including the UN. The movement called al-Qaeda was not recognized until later.

Clinton's national security adviser, Tony Lake, began to pester the CIA for more information about bin Laden until his connection with particular acts of terrorism was established, and Clinton began to seek more legal authority and more money in order to go on the offensive against terrorism both at home and abroad. Between 1995 and 2000 the counterterrorism budget increased from $5.7 billion to $11.1 billion, and the authority of the FBI and other government agencies to take action against potential terrorists was steadily enhanced. There was considerable resistance to these measures. Republicans in Congress objected to expanding organized-crime wiretap provisions to terrorists, while Tom DeLay and others agreed with the National Rifle Association that the proposed restrictions on bomb-making infringed on the right to bear arms. The FBI opposed the Federal Air Marshals program.


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Clarke describes the new concern for homeland security in the 1990s and Clinton's enthusiastic involvement in the process of making terrorism and bin Laden a major national priority. There was also a growing awareness of al-Qaeda's ultimate goal of a global Islamic caliphate, and of its plans to exploit the policies of Western countries. "The ingredients al Qaeda dreamed of for propagating its movement," Clarke writes, "were a Christian government attacking a weaker Muslim region, allowing the new terrorist group to rally jihadists from many countries to come to the aid of the religious brethren."

In August 1998, the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were simultaneously struck with powerful truck bombs. Clinton accepted the advice of Clarke and his other advisers to retaliate with cruise missiles on a supposed chemical plant in Sudan and on an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was reported to be having a meeting. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was at its height, and Clinton told his advisers to propose action to him without regard to his messy personal problems. If they thought this was the best time to hit the Afghan camps, he would order it and take the heat for the "Wag the Dog" criticism that would inevitably follow.

Clarke comments with disgust that the public reaction to the nearly successful attempt to wipe out the al-Qaeda leadership in retaliation for two deadly terrorist attacks was just as perverse as the White House had foreseen, ascribing the retaliation exclusively to Clinton's supposed desire to distract attention from the Lewinsky affair. This episode made Clarke's attempts to get approval for follow-up attacks on al-Qaeda far more difficult.

At Clinton's request, Clarke produced a combined political and military plan for the destruction of al-Qaeda, entitled—appropriately for an alumnus of the Boston Latin School—"Delenda" after Cato the Elder's injunction "Carthago delenda est"— Carthage must be destroyed. The plan included aid to the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, wholesale attacks on the al-Qaeda camps, the use of Predator drones for reconnaissance and later, so it was hoped, to fire missiles at al-Qaeda targets, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Clarke's ideas were largely frustrated by the caution of the CIA, by a lack of reliable and timely "actionable" intelligence, by the fear of alienating Pakistan, and by the administration's anxiety that Clinton might be labeled a mad bomber for relying too heavily on cruise missiles.


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There were, however, other counter-terrorism successes, including the foiling of the so-called millennium plots to attack Los Angeles International Airport and American targets in Jordan. The first Predator flights were promising, one of them visually identifying Osama bin Laden walking with his bodyguards, but the flights were then suspended for the winter. When the USS Cole was attacked in Aden in October 2000, Clarke's proposal to retaliate by attacking al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan was thwarted by the CIA's reluctance to identify al-Qaeda as the Cole culprit and by the Pentagon's refusal to contemplate military action by special forces or bombing.

The Clinton period was certainly the summit of Clarke's government career, and he seems to have been involved, mostly covertly, in an extraordinary number of active foreign policy matters. Sometimes the obsession with covert action got out of hand. Clarke describes a "secret" plan, Operation Orient Express, "reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the UN head [Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali]." He describes "racing to the Oval Office" to prevent Clinton making any compromises on this matter. Clarke does not explain why "doing in," i.e. ousting, Boutros-Ghali was such an urgent national objective. It was, of course, a rather shoddy election-year tactic to steal for the Clinton campaign, as early as possible, Bob Dole's politically profitable verbal assaults on Boutros-Ghali. "Doing in" Boutros-Ghali was eventually easily achieved by the normal public method of using the US veto in the UN Security Council. Clarke comforts himself that "the entire operation had strengthened [UN Ambassador] Albright's hand in the competition to be Secretary of State in the second Clinton administration." This is not Clarke at his best.

3.
"In general," Clarke comments, "the Bush appointees distrusted anything invented by the Clinton administration and anything of a multilateral nature...." The incoming administration was focused on confronting China, going ahead with a missile defense system ("Star Wars"), developing its relationship with Vladimir Putin's Russia, and withdrawing from various multilateral obligations. As General Don Kerrick, Clinton's deputy national security adviser, put it, the new crew had the "same strategic perspective as the folks in the eighties."[5] The new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, knew Clarke and kept him on, but she disliked, as inappropriate for the National Security Council, the many different operational functions and the large office that had grown up around him. She therefore downgraded the office of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism so that Clarke was at the deputy level and no longer made reports to the top-level meetings of "Principals"—among them the heads of the State and Defense Departments and the FBI and CIA.

On January 25, 2001, in the first week of the new administration, Clarke asked for a cabinet-level meeting to review the al-Qaeda threat. Rice told him that he and the other deputies should "frame" the issue first. He also submitted an updated version of the proposals for action he had made in the late Clinton period. The deputies only managed to meet on this subject in April. It was at this meeting that Clarke heard a warning of future strategic trends. After Clarke outlined to the meeting his ideas for dealing with the threat of al-Qaeda,

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at Defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley [Rice's deputy] asked him if he was all right. "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden," Wolfowitz responded.
I [Clarke] answered as clearly and forcefully as I could: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."
"Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example," Wolfowitz replied.
Clarke and the CIA deputy director, John McLaughlin, pointed out that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism since 1993, when cruise missiles had destroyed Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters. Wolfowitz replied that bin Laden was being given too much credit and couldn't possibly do all these operations without a state sponsor, i.e., Iraq.

As things turned out, although there had been many Principals meetings on other subjects since Bush's inauguration, the cabinet-level meeting on al-Qaeda that Clarke had requested in January only took place on September 4, a week before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

During the summer of 2001 Clarke had become more and more frustrated with the new administration's low priority for working on the threat of al-Qaeda and his own inability to do anything about it. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, shared this frustration. Telling Rice and Hadley that "maybe I'm becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the White Whale," Clarke asked to be reassigned to a post dealing with critical infrastructure protection and cyber security, a relatively new source of concern that Clarke felt strongly might be the next threat and the next point of vulnerability for the United States. It was agreed that he should take up this position on October 1.


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The summer of 2001 brought a crescendo of intelligence reports of an impending, though unspecified, major attack by al-Qaeda, and Clarke asked that the relevant government agencies and the airlines be put on full alert. He deeply regretted that the almost-daily cabinet-level meetings of the agencies concerned with intelligence and security that had been held during emergency periods in the Clinton administration no longer took place.[6] Such meetings were designed to "shake the tree," to make sure that vital information in one agency would be shared with all the others. "Somewhere in CIA," Clarke writes,

there was information that two known al Qaeda terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States. I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree, red lights and bells should have been going off.... None of that information got to me at the White House.... I certainly know what I would have done, for we had done it at the Millennium: a nationwide manhunt, rousting anyone suspected of, maybe, possibly, having the slightest connection.
Condoleezza Rice, in her testimony on April 8, characterized the just declassified "President's Daily Brief" for August 6, 2001, as "not a particular threat report," and as "historical information based on old reporting." Maybe, but some might consider alarming phrases like "Bin Laden told followers he wanted to retaliate in Washington" [for the 1998 missile strike on his Afghan base]; or that "Al-Qaeda members...have resided in or traveled to the United States for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks"; or that the FBI's information "indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks...." The red lights and bells evidently failed to go off in Crawford, Texas.

In a message to Rice before the September 4 Principals meeting on al-Qaeda urging her to consider whether or not al-Qaeda was "an existential threat to the American way of life," he asked Rice to "put herself in her own shoes when in the very near future al Qaeda had killed hundreds of Americans: 'What will you wish then that you had already done?'" Clarke does not record a reply to this message, but in her April 8 testimony Rice said that she took Clarke's message as an encouragement to press the Principals hard and not be dragged down by the bureaucracy.

4.
Clarke's account of the day of September 11 is his opening chapter—a breathless, tough-talking, take-charge narrative that is quite unlike the rest of the book. It is a crisis manager's account of the White House on one of the most terrible and frightening days in American history. Clarke does not maintain that September 11 could definitely have been stopped if his ideas had been adopted; he claims only that there were serious failures of organization, that much more could have been done, and that in any case, if thwarted, al-Qaeda would certainly try again. In his comment on Condoleezza Rice's April 8 testimony, he added that regular "shaking the tree" at cabinet level might have had some effect.[7]

Clarke believed that after September 11 the government would deal with the terrorist threat fully and systematically. Instead, after going into Afghanistan first with bombing and then with a relatively small force to remove the Taliban and, it was hoped, bin Laden, the old obsession with Iraq soon began to dominate the administration's "war on terror." Clarke, who was by then working on cyber-security, was appalled, not least because 70 percent of the American people had been persuaded that Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11. As one of America's most dedicated students of al-Qaeda, Clarke writes:

Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region.
And later, he comments,

Rather than seeking to work with the majority in the Islamic world to mold Muslim opinion against the radicals' values, we did exactly what al Qaeda said we would do. We invaded and occupied an oil-rich Arab country that posed no threat to us, while paying scant time and attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. We delivered to al Qaeda the greatest recruitment propaganda imaginable and made it difficult for friendly Islamic governments to be seen working closely with us.
In the process, the operation in Afghanistan was shortchanged, and the military resources of the United States seriously overstretched. In the current state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan, Clarke's words ring horribly true.

5.
The Staff Statements of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks are direct and unemotional documents that nonetheless contain large quantities of fascinating, and sometimes agonizing, information. From beginning to end they reveal systems, states of mind, and policies that were not attuned to the originality and monstrosity of September 11. None of the nineteen hijackers was on the FAA's list of people posing a threat to commercial aviation. Any knife with a blade of less than four inches was permitted to pass through airport security. The priority in airline instructions for dealing with hijackers was to ensure that the hi-jacked aircraft landed safely, and there was therefore to be no physical opposition to the hijackers. This was the first recorded occasion on which the hijackers actually piloted a plane; no cockpits were "hardened" to prevent intruders from entering them. The reconstruction of what probably happened in the four hijacked aircraft on September 11 is heartbreaking. These and hundreds of other details of the process, from the entry of the hijackers into the United States until the catastrophe itself, will be of immense value in devising new systems and regulations. They make grim reading.

On the diplomatic, political, military, and intelligence front the papers are equally revealing without being judgmental. The same problem of a general inability to conceive of an attack like September 11 remained. Statement 8, on national policy coordination, relies heavily on Richard Clarke's testimony, which follows the same lines as his book, but is summarized in the cool and unemotional style of the commission's staff.

The continental United States had not had a violent attack on its soil for nearly two hundred years, and the idea of domestic intelligence was a foreign and unwelcome one. In the April 8 commission hearings, Condoleezza Rice referred again and again to legal and structural problems that especially affected the cooperation of the CIA and the FBI and prevented them from sharing intelligence and information. "The country," she told the commission, "was not properly structured to deal with the threats that had been gathering for a long period of time." Rice also pointed out that the Bush administration, in its early months, was searching for a more strategic approach to al-Qaeda that would take into account relations with Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries in the region. It would also include long-term plans for reform and democratization that would, among other things, change the nature of the Middle East. She did not refer to the Israel–Palestinian problem in this context—a striking omission.

6.
There is nothing in Clarke's government career to substantiate his critics' charges of a desire for personal publicity—if anything quite the contrary. He has also, predictably, been characterized as a disgruntled employee getting his own back on the Bush administration for his demotion from cabinet rank. He told Tim Russert that he felt he could not go on working on terrorism for an administration "that was treating it in such an unimportant way" and therefore asked for the cyberspace security job, which he did not consider a demotion, and he left government service when that ended.[8]

From his book, Clarke appears to be an apolitical but strong-minded public servant of a now rather old-fashioned kind, whose ultimate loyalty is to what he perceives to be the public good and the long-term interests of the people of the United States. He needed, he writes in the epilogue to his book, to tell the public "why I think we failed and why I think America is still failing to deal with the threat posed by terrorists distorting Islam." These are certainly vitally important public issues. Robert McNamara has sometimes been criticized for continuing as secretary of defense out of loyalty to President Johnson long after he had personally concluded that the war in Vietnam could not be won. That is one form of loyalty. To Lesley Stahl, who commented that Against All Enemies was not a loyal book, Clarke replied, "When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside."[9] That sums up another kind of loyalty.

Clarke's book suggests the most likely reason why this very private man finally went public. As a professional public servant Clarke had, for thirty years, devoted all his formidable ability and energy to the defense and security of his country. Even in the best of times, he was notoriously short of patience with anyone or anything that seemed to get in his way. During the Clinton years he had had considerable success in alerting the government at the very highest level to the growing threat of al-Qaeda. In the Bush administration he encountered a determined refusal to give al-Qaeda priority over other issues at the very moment when intelligence was indicating ever more ominous security threats to the United States.


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Before September 11 Clarke had already had some inkling of the extent to which ideologues and fixed ideas would dictate policy in the new administration, and as a professional public servant this tendency shocked him. He assumed, however, that the catastrophe of September 11 would produce a strong and objective approach to the dangers of terrorism that undoubtedly lay ahead. He was aghast when the administration willfully galloped off in the wrong direction and began to prepare for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a move that he considered an immensely self-destructive strategic error. He presumably felt that the public ought to hear the views of an authoritative source before another presidential election.

In what circumstances are highly placed public servants justified in abandoning their loyalty to a particular administration for what they see as a larger and more compelling loyalty to the truth and to the future? In today's Washington, in full knowledge of the likely consequences, it takes courage and conviction to take this step. But the stakes for the United States are now very high. Disasters and ominous trends abroad and serious challenges at home demand more than vitriolic partisan politics, spin and secretiveness, dogmatic decisions and a total inability to admit, or learn from, mistakes, and contempt or worse for dissenters. The current situation and the future of the United States demand united policies based on recognition of past errors, on the truth however disagreeable, on a reasonably shared view of the future, and on serious discussion and debate. Clarke's experience and his opinions on the United States' greatest immediate danger are important to the future health and security of his country.

Notes
[1] In her testimony to the Commission on Terrorist Attacks on April 8, Condoleezza Rice maintained that Bush said this in answer only to a question about the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

[2] For example, in The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon (Random House, 2002), in Time magazine in August 2002, and more recently in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2004).

[3] National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Staff Statement No. 8, p. 3.

[4] Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 232–233.

[5] See Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 336.

[6] In her April 8 testimony Condoleezza Rice pointed out that Clarke's group of agency deputies was meeting several times a week. Clarke has replied that frequent cabinet-level meetings specifically on the al-Qaeda threat and subsequent orders by cabinet members to their various departments would have been far more effective in revealing vital information (ABC News, April 8, 2004).

[7] ABC News, April 8, 2004.

[8] Clarke's interview with Tim Russert, NBC News, March 28, 2004.

[9] CBS, 60 Minutes, March 21, 2004.



- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004

 
"Plan of Attack," Woodward, reviewed by Urquhart, NYRB May 2004
The New York Review of Books: A Cautionary Tale
Volume 51, Number 10 · June 10, 2004
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Review
A Cautionary Tale
By Brian Urquhart
Bob Woodward
(click for larger image)
Plan of Attack
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 467 pp., $28.00

So far, 2004 is the year of the singing insider. In January Paul O'Neill, the former secretary of the Treasury, ascended to a high place on the best-seller list. In March the former counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard Clarke, vaulted over him to the top. In April the journalist/insider extraordinaire, Bob Woodward, surpassed all his predecessors. Although his book may represent the high-water mark of this flood of apparent revelation, there are certainly several smaller surges to come.

The program for an insider book is now well established. There are enticing pre-publication rumors and leaks; at publication time one or two quasi-sensational passages, often out of context, become front-page stories; rumbles of anger and comment from the administration enliven the author's talk show appearances; the book rises to the top of the best-seller lists; and in a few weeks it is superseded by the next sensation. It is not clear how many people actually read these books, which often contain much new information and interesting comment. As for their impact on the political process, the most recent polls show that, along with the September 11 hearings and the debacle in Iraq, they have so far had little discernible effect on the President's popularity ratings, although his approval ratings for foreign policy and the Iraq war are declining.[1]

1.
Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack is, for better or for worse, sui generis. Who else can talk on the record for several hours to the President of the United States, who then encourages his senior colleagues to follow suit? The enterprise is filled out by seventy or so lesser mortals who, not that it matters, prefer to remain anonymous. These remarkable arrangements apparently justify the absence of all references or footnotes. The provenance and reliability of the many pages of quoted remarks and dialogue—as many as in most novels of similar length—are left to the reader's imagination. My favorite product of this method occurs on page 440. "'HOLY SHIT!' Powell said to himself as he read a copy of Tenet's speech."

Woodward does not set out to be a graceful writer and he avoids analysis or comment, but he certainly has a style of his own. Maureen Dowd has pointed out that body language plays an extraordinarily large part in Woodward's descriptions.[2] Indeed one often longs for more articulate forms of expression, especially on important issues. Sports also provide important background. George Tenet, the avid basketball player, cries "Slam-dunk!" to justify to a skeptical President a remarkably thin intelligence dossier on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's experience as a college wrestler is given due weight, and Colin Powell believes that "work and life are contact sports."

As the title implies, the core of Plan of Attack is the long and complex buildup of United States forces from November 21, 2001, when the President asked Rumsfeld, "What kind of a war plan do you have for Iraq?" until March 19, 2003, when the war started in earnest with the delivery of thirty-six cruise missiles and four bunker-buster bombs from two Stealth F-117s on a target of opportunity, Dora Farm outside Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein and family were believed to be staying. The agent who reported their presence was killed in the attack; Saddam Hussein was not.

This was no ordinary military build-up. Washington was pursuing simultaneously a military and a diplomatic approach to Iraq, and considerable stealth and public denial were required. Woodward reveals the now controversial secret transfer of $700 million from the appropriation for Afghanistan to pay for initial costs of the buildup in the Gulf. "I have no war plans on my desk," Bush told Chirac and Schroeder in May 2002. Allies and potential allies had to be persuaded, bases and transit and overflight rights secured, and, above all, intelligence gathered to support the rationale for the war, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This all makes for a fascinating story, but it is the main actors, their behavior, and their relations with each other that make the book a best seller.

Woodward's previous book, Bush at War, ended with the House and Senate votes that, in October 2002, granted the President full authority to attack Iraq unilaterally. It was the story of a young president standing tall after the horror of September 11, which is presumably the reason for the almost unlimited access that Woodward was given for a second book. The rivalries and disagreements between cabinet members were already simmering in the first book, but still under control. By the end of Bush at War Colin Powell is beginning to develop a closer relationship with the President, and the outlook is tough but promising.

2.
Woodward's current book, Plan of Attack, is a cautionary tale about the government of the most powerful country in the world. It appears against the ominous backdrop of mounting disaster in Iraq and the steady expansion of global suicide terrorism. The book is inevitably less upbeat than its predecessor. Nonetheless, the President himself still comes out much better than his colleagues. He is decisive—sometimes too decisive—asks tough questions, cuts through unnecessary complications, and is skeptical of glib intelligence reports or rose-tinted scenarios. When Kanan Makiya, one of the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi émigrés, visits Bush with two other Iraqi dissidents, Makiya tells Bush,

"You will change the image of the United States in the region. Democracy is truly doable in Iraq. Force for destruction can be turned to a force for construction. Iraqis are a technically able people. They are literate with electricized villages."
"We're planning for the worst," Bush said.
"People will greet troops with flowers and sweets," [another dissident] said.
"How do you know?" Bush asked.
Dogmatic and ill-informed advice, deficient or misleading intelligence, a tendency to grandiose but unrealistic objectives, and a disinclination to listen to dissenting voices also dominate the narrative. When Brent Scowcroft, the President's father's national security adviser, writes, in an Op-Ed piece entitled "Don't Attack Saddam," that there was little or no evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and advised against the US going it alone in Iraq, Powell thanks him, but Condoleezza Rice rebukes him for "a slap at the President." There is also a pervasive sense of posturing for electoral purposes. When Karl Rove comes to Crawford over Christmas 2002 to discuss the 2004 reelection campaign, he brings a strategic plan that starts:

PERSONA

Strong Leader Bold Action

Big Ideas Peace in World

More Compassionate America Cares About People Like Me

Leads a Strong Team

However, Bush very sensibly resists Rove's plan to initiate fund-raisers in February 2003. "We got a war coming," the President told Rove flatly, "and you're just going to have to wait."


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Woodward describes in detail the personal feelings and feuds of Bush's court, often apparently in their own words. From the earliest days there had been a basic disagreement between the Defense Department, where Paul Wolfowitz was an unstoppable advocate of getting rid of Saddam Hussein, and the State Department, where Powell and his colleagues thought the idea was lunacy. Vice President Cheney also was obsessed with getting rid of Saddam. After September 11 this obsession was reinforced by the studiously circulated but unsubstantiated ideas that Saddam Hussein had been part of the September 11 attack, that he might give WMDs to terrorists, and by Donald Rumsfeld's suggestion that September 11 provided an excellent opportunity to attack Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin Powell is the Hamlet, the troubled man, of this story. From the beginning he worried that "from Washington and the Pentagon and the White House, and even his own State Department, war seemed antiseptic, and at times like a great game.... The top echelon of the Bush administration was notably free of those who had seen combat." Powell saw the President far less frequently than Cheney or Rumsfeld. He was doubtful that the President fully grasped the potential consequences of war, but he did succeed in persuading Bush to speak to the UN General Assembly about Iraq and to go to the Security Council, where he initially scored a great success getting the tough Resolution 1441 adopted. Powell thought that "Cheney was 'terrified' because once the diplomatic road was opened up, it might work."

Despite the tentativeness and unreliability of the intelligence, the rhetoric for war became increasingly shrill. On August 26, 2002, Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." Cheney dismissed with contempt the importance of sending UN inspectors back to Iraq. The vice-president, Powell thought, was "beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam." Bush told members of the House on September 26, "Saddam Hussein is a terrible guy who is teaming up with al-Qaeda. He tortures his own people and hates Israel."

The strident certainty of the rhetoric steadily mounted in spite of the return of the UN inspectors to Iraq in October and the lack of serious evidence. In fact the inspectors set off a new round of paranoia. Hans Blix, the levelheaded Swede who ran the inspection team, remembered the problems of the previous inspection group and was determined to keep his UN group independent of the CIA. He was spied on, publicly reviled, and called a liar. One source even called him "Greenspanesque." To add insult to injury, Woodward reveals that Karl Rove, "the highest ranking Norwegian-American in the White House...was convinced of the historical duplicity of the Swedes..." and contributed to the President being "wired up" about Blix. (After all these gratuitous humiliations, Blix, at last, has the consolation of having been proved right.) War was inevitable, the official line ran, because Saddam Hussein refused to turn over his weapons of mass destruction, an impossible dilemma for the Iraqi despot since he had none to turn over, although he never seems to have realized that he had to prove it.

Rice and Rumsfeld said okay to war. The vice-president was crazy for war. That favorite White House visitor, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, had at last been given his long-demanded assurance that there would be war. ("This is going to happen," Rumsfeld told him on January 11, 2003. "Once we start, Saddam is toast," added the vice-president.) But no one had officially informed the secretary of state, so the President told Colin Powell in a twelve-minute talk. ("His tight, forward-leaning, muscular body language verified his words.") Bush asked Powell if he was with him. Powell, after asking Bush if he knew that he "would be going to be owning this place" (Iraq), said that he was. Woodward says that to walk away at that point "would have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty to the president and to Powell's own soldier's code, to the United States military, and mostly [sic] to the several hundred thousand who would be going to war." Surely this is protesting too much. After all, the troops hadn't yet gone to war, and this was a matter of the highest possible national and international concern. Woodward does not discuss whether Powell's strong disapproval of what he regarded as a deluded war policy, and his view that that policy might well lead to disaster, should have, or did, cause him to consider resigning at an earlier stage. At that point, when war was already a virtual certainty, his resignation would surely have had a very strong impact. After all, other senior officials—Secretary of State Cyrus Vance among them—have resigned over far less weighty issues.

3.
One of the most surprising, and disastrous, aspects of the preparations for the war in Iraq was the lack of serious attention to planning for the occupation. Bush only signed the National Security Presidential Directive setting up the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance on January 20, 2003, two months before the war started. The Defense Department official responsible for occupation planning was the undersecretary for policy, Douglas Feith, a protégé of Richard Perle. Woodward says that Feith "appeared to equate policy with paper" and was not popular with the military. About Feith, General Tommy Franks was reported to have told colleagues, "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day." Frank Miller, the director of the NSC staff for defense, a former naval officer and nineteen-year veteran of the Senior Executive Service, thought that "too many senior and mid-level people in Defense were big-idea people who loved concepts, paper and talk, but they were not experienced managers. 'They don't do implementation,' he reported to Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley." This was not a promising start for the most vital and difficult part of the war planning.

The turf war between State and Defense didn't help either. The State Department's meticulously thorough "Future of Iraq Project" was not welcome in Rumsfeld's Defense Department. Even less welcome were the seventy-five State Department experts who had done the study and might, in a less crazily parochial situation, have been expected to be in the vanguard going into Iraq. Powell was enraged to learn that the leader of the team, Thomas Warrick, and another expert, Meghan O'Sullivan, had been ordered by Rumsfeld to leave the Pentagon by sundown. "What the hell is going on?" Powell said in a phone call to Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld said that as they got into postwar planning, the work had to be done by those who were truly committed to this war and supporters of change and not those who had written or said things that were not supportive. Powell took this to mean that his people didn't support "exiles like Chalabi."

After a strident top-level row, O'Sullivan was allowed to return to the Pentagon, but not Warrick. In the bloody shambles that the Iraq occupation has become, this absurd interdepartmental tiff on a supremely important subject seems criminal.

Ironically Powell the doubter, because the President thought he had "credibility," was the administration's unanimous choice to present the case for Saddam's WMDs to the UN Security Council and to defuse all the damaging questions about Saddam's WMDs that Blix's inspectors were beginning to raise. According to Woodward, "Powell thought that Cheney took intelligence and converted uncertainty and ambiguity into fact." On this occasion Powell came pretty near to doing the same thing himself, in spite of rigorously selecting from the intelligence offered by Cheney's office and the CIA. With what seemed great conviction, Powell paraded before the council pictures of alleged installations and sinister vehicles, among other gimmicks, which we now know to have been a collection of nonexistent smoking guns. He convinced many people, including that most skeptical of journalists, the late Mary McGrory.

Largely out of consideration for Tony Blair's difficulties with domestic opposition to the war, Bush had allowed Powell to continue to pursue the diplomatic track through the UN Security Council, but no consensus on an enabling resolution could be reached. The troops were ready to go, and, although Woodward doesn't mention it, the weather in Iraq was getting warmer. Bush's declaration of war came as an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. The ultimatum was accompanied by a crescendo of hyperbole about Saddam's WMDs, cooperation with terrorists, and imminent threat to the US and everyone else.

4.
If there is a sting in Woodward's book, it is in his very long epilogue. The war starts amazingly well. Saddam doesn't use "unconventional weapons" (because he didn't have any), and, Bush tells Blair, "The body language of Tommy [General Franks] and all the commanders is pretty positive." However, Woodward's tone begins quietly to change. On April 13 Cheney hosts a small victory dinner—which, one year later, seems foolishly premature—for Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Kenneth Adelman, a friend of Cheney's and a former director of arms control in the Reagan administration. There is much chuckling at Powell's expense. Cheney says Powell "likes to be popular," and "Colin always had major reservations about what we were trying to do." Powell soon gets his own back. During the planning period, Powell had always felt "that the easier the war looked, the less Rumsfeld, the Pentagon and Franks had worried about the aftermath." Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Powell's closest friend, concludes that Condoleezza Rice's National Security Council is dysfunctional in coordinating foreign policy.

This time the President doesn't quite escape either. In January 2004 David Kay, the resigning head of the Iraqi Survey Group that had been looking for Saddam's WMDs, announced, "We were almost all wrong" about the WMDs. Commenting on this to a group of editors, Powell made the Delphic statement that "the absence of stockpiles changes the political calculus," which led to the Washington Post headline, "Powell Says New Data May Have Affected War Decision," which in turn enraged both the President and Rice. Bush is evidently touchy on the WMD question, as well he might be. When Woodward told him that many people were saying that he had become "less the voice of realism for not saying and acknowledging that the weapons had not yet been found," Bush hedged and then said, "But you run in different circles than I do. Much more elite." He then reaffirmed the correctness of his decision to go to war. "And there is no doubt in my mind we should have done this. Not only for our own sake, but for the Iraqi citizens." No doubt at all. Perhaps that is one of the most dangerous problems facing the US.

5.
For all the military and diplomatic moves, the feuds, gossip, and downright foolishness, another, far more disturbing theme runs through Woodward's book. This is the sense of messianic big ideas not properly thought through, a certainty that sometimes even hints at divine rightness, and an undertone of manifest destiny under the guidance of Almighty God. It would be audacious at the best of times to proclaim publicly an inten-tion to remake the world; it seems both tactless and counterproductive to do so when the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are desperate, when the obscene acts at Abu Ghraib have shocked the world, and when the rhetoric of the fundamentalist and terrorist movements which are our most urgent problem is focused on a "holy war" against "crusaders" and the heretic West.

Cheney provides a good example of great ideas not properly thought through when he says of Bush, "Democracy in the Middle East is just a big deal for him. It's what's driving him." Sometimes supposedly great ideas seem to pop up out of nowhere. Explaining to Woodward his reasons for agreeing to be interviewed, Bush said that the carefully targeted war on Saddam Hussein "will enable other leaders, if they feel like they have to go to war, to spare innocent citizens and their lives.... To me the big news is America has changed how you fight and win war, and therefore makes it easier to keep the peace in the long run. And that's the historical significance of this book as far as I'm concerned." (Woodward gives no estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties.)

Tony Blair, Bush's Iraq soulmate, creates some kind of record for ill-timed grandiosity when he tells Bush at the beginning of the war, "I kind of think that the decisions taken in the next few weeks will determine the rest of the world for years to come. As primary players, we have a chance to shape the issues that are discussed. Both of us will have enormous capital and a lot of people will be with us." The familiar generalizations—changing the world, putting a new face on the Middle East, building democracy abroad, the United States as the beacon of freedom in the world—seem less benevolent when used to justify preventive or preemptive war. For many people in the world outside, they have also come to represent an anachronistic arrogance.


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Bush's closest associates have been at pains to emphasize that Bush is decisive, his own man, and very much in charge, but Woodward writes, "Powell noted silently that things didn't really get decided until the president had met with Cheney alone." Still, however the decision process actually works in the White House, there can be no doubt that the President's evangelical Christian faith is an important part of it. Recalling the moment at which the order was given to launch the ground forces into Iraq, Bush told Woodward, "It was emotional for me. I prayed as I walked around the circle. I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty, that there be minimal loss of life.... Going into this period I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will.... I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible...."

That would seem to be the sincere statement of a deeply religious person at a very critical moment in his life. It is when the President's personal faith appears to enter into policy, in the talk of "evil" and "evildoers," or "those who are not with us are with the terrorists," or of a war that is carrying out the will of Almighty God, that serious concerns arise. Our most immediate and dangerous enemy, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, have already declared a holy war against our society and all its cherished values. If we are to face this enemy united and confident in ourselves, we need the widest possible coalition of allies, including the governments of Islamic states. It would be disastrous if a powerful country like the United States were somehow to talk itself and its allies into a religious war.

There is also the problem of where, in public, personal faith should stop and national leadership begin. It is no secret that Christian evangelicals, whose unshakable fundamentalist beliefs go beyond issues of domestic policy and influence foreign policy questions such as the Israeli–Palestinian problem, are a growing and very influential part of the electorate. Recently Charlie Rose asked Bob Woodward about Bush's remark that he appeals for support to a higher father than his own, the forty-first president. Woodward replied that he understood that this was rather standard Christian theology. About Bush's statement quoted above, that in making war he is a good messenger of God's will, Woodward added that "I know in the White House, they think this is great to get out, because most people in America who read that or hear about that are going to say, that's what they want their president doing."[3] I wonder if Woodward is exaggerating about "most people in America." Anyway, let us hope that we are not taking the first subliminal step toward religious war.

In another interview Woodward provides a poignant epigraph to his book: "...If you push or try to push toward the question of who is George Bush, this decision to undertake this war is the most defining characteristic of him. Everyone I've interviewed agrees he was passionate, he was hands-on, he was committed, and the problem is, he may have been wrong."[4] Although some Cabinet members have disputed Woodward's renderings, the White House seems happy enough with the portrait of the President that emerges from his book, and that is one of the most disturbing things about it. As for the possibility of the President being wrong, that is something that this White House does not seem able to consider.

—May 13, 2004

Notes
[1] See, for example, "Bush Poll Numbers Defy Conventional Wisdom," by C.K. Rairden, Washington Dispatch, April 21, 2004, and "Support for War Is Down Sharply Poll Concludes," The New York Times, April 29, 2004.

[2] "The Body Politic," The New York Times, April 22, 2004.

[3] Charlie Rose, April 20, 2004.

[4] Larry King Live, April 19, 2004.

- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004

 
The Rise of bin Laden, by Ahmed Rashid - The NYRB - May 2004
The New York Review of Books: The Rise of bin Laden
Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
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Review
The Rise of bin Laden
By Ahmed Rashid
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
by Steve Coll
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95

1.
As millions of people around the world gathered in front of their TV sets in March and April to observe the public hearings held by the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks, the one name that seemed to hover over the room was Osama bin Laden. While they watched, one senior official after another from the Clinton or Bush administrations spoke of the numerous attempts by the CIA before September 11 to capture or kill him.

Some of the stories of their efforts to capture bin Laden had already been told. Those who had followed recent accounts of the work of US intelligence knew that the Clinton administration would not give an order to kill him in February 1999, when he was at a hunting camp in southern Afghanistan with a group of Arab princes. They also knew that the CIA hired both an Afghan mercenary group to kidnap him from an al-Qaeda farm in Kandahar in Afghanistan and a group of Pakistani commandos to do the same. Some of the listening public probably knew as much as the members of the commission.

Among the best informed were those who had read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, a remarkable book published a few weeks before the public hearings began, which got much attention among people who follow intelligence matters, although nothing like the publicity given shortly afterward to Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.[1] Clarke, after all, was one of the most powerful experts on terrorism in the White House. That he would openly say that the administration he once worked for was fighting the wrong war was wholly unexpected. Steve Coll's background is quite different. He was a reporter in Afghanistan, and he has been the managing editor of The Washington Post since 1998.

Ghost Wars, which has taken him twelve years to write, spells out the CIA's covert work in Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union invaded that blighted country in 1979. Coll recounts in detail the CIA's encouragement and support of the Islamic jihad against the Soviets, and the consequences of this support for the rise of radical Islamists like bin Laden. Not surprisingly, the book gives particular emphasis to the critical period during the late 1990s after bin Laden established himself in Afghanistan and then, with the help of the Taliban regime, began his global jihad against the US and the West.

Coll was able to secure secret documents about the CIA's operations. He talked not just with its officials, but with spymasters and spies in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other countries. No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events. Rarely hasa book been able to anticipate, as Coll's has, the revelations of government bureaucrats, such as Richard Clarke, about intelligence. It does so, moreover, in a more comprehensive way than the recent testimony of US officials has done.


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Coll has avoided a pitfall facing any reporter who is given access to secret government files. The CIA has a long record of manipulating the press and television and putting out its own interpretation of events. And its chief, George Tenet, the only high-level official who has served both Clinton and Bush, is a master of political survival and spin. Some writers given access to the innermost corridors of power appear mesmerized by their proximity to the real players, and it shows. It does not show in Coll's book.

Bob Woodward's Bush at War[2] got more attention than any of the other post–September 11 books. Woodward was given access to the decision-making process in the White House in the days following September 11, which led to the US attack on Afghanistan.[3] From Woodward's account, George Tenet and the CIA come out smelling like roses; clearly, they were prime sources of his book. Woodward would have us believe that the CIA had "assets"—informants and agents—on the ground in Afghanistan; that it was fully in command of the facts about bin Laden; and that it was raring to start covert operations in that country before the war in Afghanistan began. The CIA thus wanted to put to shame Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld because they did not appear to have the resources that Tenet claimed to have. Coll shows that the reality was entirely different—very few CIA agents, for example, spoke any one of the languages of Afghanistan.

Woodward's book made some of his fellow journalists cringe with embarrassment. In uncritically reporting Tenet's views to his readers, he wrote as though he was the court note-taker for a medieval king. He rarely questioned what he was told, he seldom offered a nonofficial point of view, and he accepted Tenet's self-serving version of events.

We can be thankful that Coll is not mesmerized by access to the powerful and does not feel obliged to defend the CIA. Instead, he offers us a much more balanced account, blaming the CIA for not having had an adequate presence in Afghanistan and for not knowing much about the country. He also blames the Clinton and Bush administrations for having prevented the CIA from taking action against al-Qaeda. In contrast to Woodward, Coll draws on a variety of different sources and shows how there was conflict within both administrations over the seriousness of the threat of terrorism. Particularly striking is the portrait he gives of Clarke as the tough-minded expert on terrorism who fought for stronger measures against al-Qaeda.

At least some of the facts are simple enough. During the 1980s, the CIA paid hundreds of millions of dollars in covert aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, an Islamist force that opposed the Soviet domination of Afghanistan and was also backed by Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence (ISI). Following the initial success of the anti-Soviet campaign, CIA director William Casey persuaded the Reagan administration in 1985 to increase this support dramatically. The CIA particularly encouraged the recruitment of radical Islamist fighters— many of whom were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood—believing them to be more dedicated to the defeat of the Soviet occupying forces than secular or royalist Afghani groups. As Coll writes, the United States adopted a policy that

looked forward to a new era of direct infusions of advanced US military technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers designed to demoralize the Soviet high command. Among other consequences these changes pushed the CIA, along with its clients in the Afghan resistance and in Pakistani intelligence, closer to the gray fields of assassination and terrorism.

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When the US walked away from Afghanistan in 1989, it left behind a seasoned group of jihadists, whose brand of radical Islam had found an enormously rich supporter in Osama bin Laden. The son of a Saudi billionaire, bin Laden had joined the jihad shortly after the Soviet invasion, using his financial resources to build military facilities and training camps for volunteer fighters. Bin Laden first began to turn his radical energies against the United States in 1990, when the Saudi royal family agreed to invite American troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia as part of its alliance against Iraq. Coll quotes Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence chief, suggesting that this was the moment when bin Laden's extremism and hatred for American infidels began to assert itself: "He changed from a calm, peaceful, and gentle man interested in helping Muslims into a person who believed that he would be able to amass and command an army...."

After the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from that country, so did the CIA—not just from Afghanistan, but from virtually all of South and Central Asia, a region that had less and less importance for the post–cold war foreign policy of the two Clinton administrations. In 1996 the CIA was taken completely by surprise when the ragtag Taliban captured Kabul and put the famous Tajik-speaking resistance commander Ahmed Shah Massoud to flight. In 1998, the CIA failed to predict that India would explode a nuclear device or that Pakistan would launch a military offensive in the Kargil district of Indian Kashmir the following year. And these are just some of the more publicly known failures of the agency that Coll has pointed out.

Coll writes that although the CIA had passed, through Pakistan, billions of dollars in military aid to the Afghan Mujahideen, it was not much interested in who was getting the weapons, nor was it concerned with what a post-Soviet Afghanistan would look like. In choosing the leaders and organization that would get arms and money, the CIA was dependent on the ISI and the Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Department (GID). Coll writes of the period, "There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence." Huge deliveries of arms and money intended for the Mujahideen passed first through the hands of the ISI, which predictably took a considerable cut for itself before allowing deliveries to the Mujahideen groups they had selected.

Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's intelligence services first backed the Islamic extremist group Hezb-e-Islami—led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—and then, finding Hekmatyar greedy and unpopular, they backed another group, the Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Both men are now on the US most-wanted list. When the Pakistanis were supporting Hekmatyar, the Saudis were channeling their money to a motley collection of Afghan Wahhabis tutored or educated in Saudi Arabia, in part with the help of the Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden. In the mid-1990s the CIA allowed the ISI and the GID to dictate much of the course of the Afghan civil war, including the rise of the Taliban when the Mujahideen were weakened by incessant fighting with one another and by loss of public support. Coll writes that the Saudis, preferring to work from a distance, funded ISI activities in Afghanistan and even paid cash "bonuses" to the ISI officers who promoted Saudi interests.

Coll also found that by 1998, when the Taliban ruled over two thirds of the country, the ISI maintained eight stations in Afghanistan, staffed by officers who gave assistance to the Taliban and helped train militants for the war in Kashmir. He repeatedly accuses former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of "lying" when she told visiting US officials that Pakistan had nothing to do with the Taliban. He also debunks the widely held theory among conspiracy theorists that the CIA was directly supporting the Taliban. It did so essentially through its support of the ISI.

2.
I spent the 1990s trying to decipher the failure of the US to have a clear policy toward Afghanistan. I worked largely from Islamabad, where the US embassy had a single mid-level State Department official monitoring events in Afghanistan and a consulate with a small staff in Peshawar, near the border. No doubt there were CIA agents in touch with them, if they were not agents themselves, but their sources of information were largely Afghan exiles living in Pakistan and newspaper reports from journalists who ventured inside the country. In short, however energetically and enthusiastically, they collected much the same information that a competent journalist would have at the time. This left the US largely ignorant about the inner workings of the Taliban organization and its connections with bin Laden. Coll makes it clear that the CIA had no serious presence in Afghanistan or the capacity to monitor events there, let alone the ability to develop useful sources and allies inside the country.

Robert Baer, a former CIA official, has written that, in the 1990s, very few people in the entire agency could speak Pashto or Persian—the two main languages in Afghanistan.[4] The writer Robin Moore, in his book The Hunt for bin Laden,[5] notes that when groups of US Special Forces and CIA agents were secretly airlifted into northern Afghanistan to start mobilizing the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance against the Taliban after September 11, most of them could speak Arabic and Russian, but not any of the languages used in Afghanistan. In my own reporting, I observed that the CIA had no competent interpreters and had to use sign language in their initial contacts with the Northern Alliance as well as in dealing with other groups.

After September 11, I was deluged with dozens of e-mails from US recruiting agencies who asked my help in hiring Dari or Pashto speakers "for government work." For an outsider like myself, this lack of languages was the most obvious and glaring example of the lack of interest in Afghanistan by the US government and the CIA in particular. The CIA had by then a cell of agents and informants in the region to monitor al-Qaeda, but it suffered from the same ignorance.

For the preceding fifteen years, leading Afghans had been warning US officials of the dangers of ignoring the country. Coll quotes a prophetic statement by President Najibullah, the Communist leader who was ousted by the Mujahideen in 1992. He attempted to convince Washington to help put together a coalition government in Kabul that would keep out the most hard-line Islamic Mujahideen leaders such as Hekmatyar. "We have," he said,

a common task—Afghanistan, the USA and the civilized world—to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a center for terrorism.
In 1992, Najibullah took refuge in a UN guest house in Kabul and was then captured and hanged by the advancing Taliban.

In the mid-1990s other leading Afghans, including Ahmed Shah Massoud, Abdul Haq, the Afghan rebel commander, and the current president, Hamid Karzai, criticized US officials for ignoring their country, but they could not get a hearing in Washington. Abdul Haq was wholly ignored by the CIA even after September 11 and he was killed by the Taliban soon after the US-led war began. Karzai, living in Quetta in Pakistan, was given an expulsion order by the ISI to leave the country just a few weeks before September 11, because he was trying to organize Afghan tribal chiefs to oppose the Taliban from Pakistani soil. Indeed, as I have learned, when Karzai went to the US and European embassies to try to get the expulsion order lifted, he received no support.

Coll makes it clear that when these men said they feared that their country was being taken over by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, they were considered no more than politicians with personal ambitions. Al-Qaeda took them far more seriously. Massoud, who continued to lead a fighting force against the Taliban, was killed by as- sassins linked to bin Laden just before September 11, and Karzai has survived several assassination attempts. To anyone who closely followed events in the region it was clear that before September 11, the threats posed by the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and bin Laden were of low priority for the Clinton and Bush administrations. After September 11, the US was suddenly faced with the problem of how to track down bin Laden and eliminate him, when he had for years successfully created close relations with the Taliban and many other Afghans and Pakistanis.


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Coll gives a fresh account of those years. In January 1996, he writes, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, first opened a new office to track bin Laden, which became known as the "bin Laden Issue Station" with the code name "Alex." At the time the CIA thought bin Laden was merely funding terrorist groups, not directing them. A few months later bin Laden flew on a rented Afghan Airlines plane from Sudan, where he had organized al-Qaeda cells among Muslims in Africa, to Jalalabad in Afghanistan; he needed two other flights to take his wives, children, and bodyguards. The CIA officials were unable to monitor his arrival, Coll writes, because they had no agents in Jalalabad, one of Afghanistan's largest cities and just a few miles from the Pakistan border. Such, Coll found, was the state of knowledge about bin Laden when he arrived in Afghanistan, a country which he was to virtually take under his control within the next four to five years.

Coll outlines the various plans that the CIA's specialists on bin Laden drew up to try to kidnap him. They wanted to fund a commando swat team from Uzbekistan which had no experience in such matters. They tried to find such a team in Pakistan, whose government had little interest because it was backing the Taliban. The CIA started financing an Afghan squad to try to kidnap him; it restarted a relationship with the anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, paying him a monthly retainer and providing him equipment so his forces could keep track of bin Laden's movements. As Coll points out, the enthusiasm and dedication of the members of the CIA's special unit concerned with bin Laden were of no help, since they were supposed to carry out the foolish plans of the CIA management.

One problem was simply that the CIA had few people they could count on—"assets"—in Afghanistan itself. The Clinton administration had no coherent policy toward the three main political forces—the Taliban, the anti-Taliban resistance, and Pakistan. Condoleezza Rice almost inadvertently summed up the dilemma of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations when she testified before the September 11 commission on April 8:

America's al-Qaeda policy wasn't working because our Afghanistan policy wasn't working. And our Afghanistan policy wasn't working because our Pakistan policy wasn't working. We recognized that America's counterterrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy.
But Rice also claimed in her testimony that the Bush administration had been moving toward a decisive new policy in the region that would have increased the chances of catching bin Laden just a week before September 11. In fact, nothing she proposed showed any promise of accomplishing that aim. Once again, it was a case of too little too late.

In fact, as Coll makes clear, since 1996 the CIA and the US government have been working in a region where both governments and inhabitants are largely opposed to the US catching bin Laden. The US made no serious attempt to change this situation. Yet nowhere in the testimony and documents made public so far does George Tenet even acknowledge these obvious contradictions. Nor did he push for the strategic shift in regional policy —particularly toward Pakistan—that should have been dictated to the US by the threat that al-Qaeda posed.

In his testimony to the September 11 commission on April 14, Tenet admitted that the CIA made mistakes and he concentrated on the technical failings, lack of manpower, and coordination with the FBI and other agencies that hampered the CIA before September 11. He stated that "between 1999 and 2001, our human agent base against the terrorist target grew by over 50 percent. We ran over seventy sources and sub-sources, twenty-five of whom operated inside Afghanistan." Even for those who know little about intelligence matters, it should be clear that this very small number of sources inside Afghanistan was insufficient. And Tenet gave us no idea of the quality of these sources—were they cooks and drivers or commanders and mullahs?

3.
Coll's book is deeply satisfying because it is much more than a treatise on the CIA's performance. It covers the entire region from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan; shows where al-Qaeda and bin Laden were getting support, discussing in detail bin Laden's complicated relationship with the Saudis, who had expelled him in 1991 but remained ambivalent about bringing him to justice; and it clarifies the battles over policy among the CIA, the White House, and the US's principal allies. It's an inside account written by an outsider, the most objective history I have read of the many failures of the CIA and the US government in the region.

Two minor criticisms can be made. First, the CIA's relationships with China and Iran could have had considerably greater emphasis. In the 1980s China had developed a close relationship with the CIA by providing the Mujahideen with weapons during their war with the Soviets. In the 1990s with the advent of the Taliban, China became increasingly concerned that some militant Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang province were joining the Tal- iban and al-Qaeda. Although China was Pakistan's closest ally, Beijing was never in favor of Pakistan's support of the Taliban. But China disappears from Coll's account after the 1980s.

Similarly, Iran was vehemently opposed to the Taliban and nearly went to war with it in 1998 when Iranian diplomats were killed in the Afghanistan town of Mazar-e-Sharif, near the Uzbekistan border. Here the lack of official contacts between the US and Iran was a disadvantage for the US. But it is still unclear to what extent the CIA tried to take advantage of Iran's anti-Taliban sentiments. If they did not, they surely should have done so through British or German or other intelligence agencies. What we know is that Iran quietly acquiesced to the American war in Afghanistan and that a low-level dialogue between the two countries finally began, which culminated in Iran giving the US and the UN its full support at the Bonn peace talks in December 2001, when the new Afghan government was formed. This could have led to an opening with Iran, but within weeks Bush had foreclosed that possibility by including the country in "the axis of evil."

Meanwhile what of bin Laden himself? There can be no doubt that he is alive and active. On April 15, he issued a new tape recording, which was interpreted by analysts as suggesting that al-Qaeda was taking a new strategic direction by trying to exploit the differences between the US and Europe. He offered European nations "a truce" if they would pull out their forces from Muslim countries. "The door to a truce is open for three months.... The truce will begin when the last soldier leaves our countries," bin Laden said. "Stop spilling our blood so we can stop spilling your blood...this is a difficult but easy equation," he added. Previous tapes issued by bin Laden have almost invariably been followed by further terrorist attacks. His reference to the March 11 attacks in Madrid as "your goods delivered back to you" intensified fears that an al-Qaeda cell may be organizing another major terrorist attack in Europe.

The next day almost every European leader replied to the tape saying they would not negotiate with terrorists, showing that bin Laden can now expect comment on his proposals from heads of government. The tape is also a major embarrassment to US and Pakistani forces, who since February have assigned thousands of soldiers to renewed offensive sweeps in the Afghanistan–Pakistan border region in order to hunt down bin Laden. It is no secret that the Bush administration is desperately anxious to catch him before the November elections, a goal that has become all the more urgent in view of the difficulties facing the US forces in Iraq.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ultimately, it has been the war in Iraq that has been mainly responsible for the failure of US attempts to capture bin Laden. Despite the horrific killings in New York and Washington on September 11, there is now (especially in view of the information in Woodward's recent Plan of Attack) more than enough evidence to prove that the Bush administration began planning the invasion of Iraq even before the war in Afghanistan ended in December 2001. Afghanistan badly needed peacekeeping troops, adequate security for both leaders and local populations, and funding for rebuilding the country. All were neglected by the US. Similarly neglected was the hunt for bin Laden. That many of his top leaders were arrested created the false impression that he and the cells of jihadists linked to him have fatally lost power. As events in Madrid and in Iraq have shown, this was an illusion.

The good will for the US and its allies arising from the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 should have been followed up by extensive local recon- struction projects, providing not only schools but, among much else, security forces, a basic welfare system, and jobs. If this had been done, local sources of reliable intelligence would also have been found. Instead, small US army garrisons were scattered along the border hundreds of miles apart. They were never provided with the funds, equipment, personnel, and other support they would have needed to gather information, follow up leads, concentrate on suspicious groups and activities, and take the other measures that are necessary if bin Laden is to be caught.

The hearings on September 11 have so far barely touched on the fact that the moment the Afghan war was over the US started moving much of its counterterrorism resources and activities from Afghanistan to Iraq—including soldiers, civilian experts, intelligence units, satellite surveillance, drones, and other high-tech devices. The hunt for Saddam Hussein took on more importance than the hunt for bin Laden, even though there is still no conclusive evidence that Hussein supported al-Qaeda or needed its backing.

Now the US military and the CIA, in a great hurry to catch bin Laden, are trying to make up for lost time in Afghanistan, sending in some two thousand Marines and moving large numbers of troops from Kabul and Kan- dahar to the border. But additional US troops will not make up for months that were lost both in gathering intelligence and gaining local tribal support as Washington pursued the war in Iraq.

Hiding out in the rugged and mountainous terrain between Afghanistan and Pakistan where some Pashtun tribesmen have proved to be excellent hosts, generously financed by cash from al-Qaeda, bin Laden seems far from being caught. The lack of attention from the US during 2002 and 2003 has probably allowed him to establish even closer links to the local population and to find more hiding places if he is threatened.

Some 70 percent of the original al-Qaeda leadership is now captured or dead, and bin Laden, unable to use the electronic communications that would reveal his location, is in no position to run day-to-day operations or direct the many organizations linked to al-Qaeda throughout the world—in sixty-eight countries, according to Tenet's testimony to the September 11 commission. However, bin Laden remains the spiritual guru and strategic guide for many thousands of Muslim militants around the world; every time he demonstrates that he is alive and can still make a forceful presentation on tape, he can be assured of more recruits to his cause of global jihad.

In hindsight, September 11 was the result both of a chronic failure of intelligence gathering and coordination among agencies working in Washington and of a failure to conceive of a strategy for the region including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and neighboring countries. But since September 11 there has been a far bigger blunder by the Bush administration: its failure to sustain momentum in the efforts to make Afghanistan more secure and more stable and to catch bin Laden. No hindsight is required in order to make this judgment. What needed to be done after the defeat of the Taliban should have been obvious. What successive US administrations could have done to prevent September 11 will always be debatable; perhaps the failure of intelligence to anticipate it is ultimately understandable, in view of the ponderous workings of bureaucracies. What is unforgivable is the failure of the current US administration to maintain the resources and manpower needed to rebuild Afghanistan and to arrest bin Laden after September 11, and its decision to go to war in Iraq instead.

—April 28, 2004

Notes
[1] Free Press, 2004. See Brian Urquhart's review, "A Matter of Truth," The New York Review, May 13, 2004.

[2] Simon and Schuster, 2003.

[3] Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster), will be reviewed in a coming issue.

[4] See Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (Crown, 2002).

[5] Random House, 2003.

- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004

 
Ahmad Chalabi: the Manipulator, by Jane Mayer - May 29, 2004
The New Yorker: Fact
THE MANIPULATOR
by JANE MAYER
Ahmad Chalabi pushed a tainted case for war. Can he survive the occupation?
Issue of 2004-06-07
Posted 2004-05-29
Ahmad Chalabi, the wealthy Iraqi Shiite who spent more than a decade working for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, prides himself on his understanding of the United States and its history. “I know quite a lot about it,” he told me not long ago. It was after midnight in Baghdad, but he was still in his office in the new headquarters of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile opposition group that Chalabi helped found in 1992. As a young man, he said, he spent several years in America, earning an undergraduate and a master’s degree in mathematics from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Chalabi began studying the uses of power in American politics, and the subject developed into a lifelong interest. One episode in American history particularly fascinated him, he said. “I followed very closely how Roosevelt, who abhorred the Nazis, at a time when isolationist sentiment was paramount in the United States, managed adroitly to persuade the American people to go to war. I studied it with a great deal of respect; we learned a lot from it. The Lend-Lease program committed Roosevelt to enter on Britain’s side—so we had the Iraq Liberation Act, which committed the American people for the liberation against Saddam.” The act, which Congress passed in 1998, made “regime change” in Iraq an official priority of the U.S. government; Chalabi had lobbied tirelessly for the legislation.

Three days after our conversation, Chalabi’s Baghdad home was raided at gunpoint by Iraqi police, who were supported by American troops. His offices were also searched. Chalabi had sensed that a confrontation with the Bush Administration was imminent. As he put it, “It’s customary when great events happen that the U.S. punishes its friends and rewards its enemies.” For years, he had been America’s staunchest Iraqi ally, and he had helped the Bush Administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi developed enemies at the C.I.A. who disputed his intelligence data and questioned his ethics, he forged a close bond with Vice-President Dick Cheney and many of the top civilians at the Pentagon, such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and Under-Secretary of Defense William J. Luti. Yet now that the occupation of Iraq appeared to be headed toward disaster, he said, many in the Administration had united in making him the scapegoat. As Chalabi saw it, he had understood America too well, and had been too successful in influencing its foreign policy. “There is a smear campaign that says I am responsible for the liberation of Iraq,” he said. Then he added with a chuckle, “But how bad is that?”

Between 1992 and the raid on Chalabi’s home, the U.S. government funnelled more than a hundred million dollars to the Iraqi National Congress. The current Bush Administration gave Chalabi’s group at least thirty-nine million dollars. Exactly what the I.N.C. provided in exchange for these sums has yet to be fully explained. Chalabi defined his role simply. “I clarified the picture,” he said. His many critics, however, believe that he distorted it. Diplomatic and intelligence officials accuse him of exaggerating the security threat that Iraq posed to the U.S.; supplying defectors who offered misleading or bogus testimony about Saddam’s efforts to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; promoting questionable stories connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda; and overestimating the ease with which Saddam could be replaced with a Western-style democracy.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism specialist who now consults for the government, told me, “With Chalabi, we paid to fool ourselves. It’s horrible. In other times, it might be funny. But a lot of people are dead as a result of this. It’s reprehensible.”

The humiliating raid on Chalabi’s home was authorized by the White House, as was a recent decision, by the Defense Department, to eliminate an I.N.C. stipend of three hundred and forty-two thousand dollars per month. Chalabi’s allies at the Pentagon were not notified of the raid in advance, although some knew that it was under consideration. The raid took place amid allegations that Chalabi or other members of the I.N.C. had engaged in numerous misdeeds, including embezzlement, theft, and kidnapping. After Baghdad police began investigating these charges, several of Chalabi’s top lieutenants fled Iraq.

One of them, Aras Karim Habib, the I.N.C.’s intelligence chief, escaped just before the serving of an arrest warrant. He is under investigation for passing classified U.S. government information to Iran—a member of what President Bush calls “the axis of evil.” According to a Chalabi aide, the I.N.C. has heard that it will be accused of telling Iran’s intelligence service that the U.S. had cracked one of its internal codes. Chalabi has denied any wrongdoing, and claims that the spying charge is politically motivated. “They are charges put out by George Tenet and his C.I.A. to discredit us,” he told Tim Russert, on “Meet the Press, ” referring to the C.I.A.’s director. Meanwhile, according to Cannistraro, two Pentagon officials connected to Chalabi are being investigated by the F.B.I., to determine whether an American official gave Chalabi classified intelligence on Iran.

The spying charges have forced Chalabi’s patrons at the Pentagon to distance themselves from him. Paul Wolfowitz, who was one of the earliest and most outspoken proponents of an invasion of Iraq, and who has been friends with Chalabi for years, spoke of him with studied detachment at a recent congressional hearing. He praised the I.N.C.’s effectiveness in providing battlefield intelligence since the war began, but he said, “I think there’s quite a bit of street legend out there that somehow he is the favorite of the Defense Department, and we had some idea of installing him as the leader of Iraq.”

But a prominent State Department official told me that he saw numerous documents that had been prepared by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which devoted considerable effort to planning the war. The office was overseen by Douglas Feith. “Every list of Iraqis they wanted to work with for positions in the government of postwar Iraq included Chalabi and all of the members of his organization,” the State Department official said.

Chalabi has consistently denied having any personal political ambitions, or any desire to lead Iraq. As early as 1994, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Anyone who wants to take power in Baghdad is crazy. I’m just in this to get rid of Saddam.” In our conversation, however, Chalabi said that he could no longer uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq. “Never is a very long time,” he said. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations, who has known Chalabi for seven years, said that Chalabi had confided to him his plans to run Iraq once America had liberated it. Ritter, who strongly opposed the war and produced a controversial documentary in 2001 asserting that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, also said that Chalabi spoke of benefitting financially from Iraq’s oil reserves, which are the second largest in the world. (Chalabi’s office denies this.)

Chalabi’s admirers claim that he has been demonized by his political enemies. Jim Hoagland, a columnist at the Washington Post, argued that the raid on Chalabi’s home was in retaliation for his candid criticism of the occupation. “By coming out in open, bitter opposition to the latest U.S. transition plan and its rehabilitation of senior Baathists, Chalabi seems to have crossed a final red line,” he wrote.

Peter Galbraith, a former Ambassador to Croatia and a human-rights activist, who has long supported Chalabi’s efforts to depose Saddam, suggested that if the Administration was unhappy with the outcome in Iraq it had only itself to blame. “Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know,” he told me. As Galbraith put it, Chalabi “figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn’t get what he wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It’s a sign of being effective. It’s not his fault that his strategy succeeded. It’s not his fault that the Bush Administration believed everything he said. Should they have? Of course not. They should have looked critically. He’s not a liar; he believed the information he was purveying, and part of it was valuable. But his goal was to get the U.S. to invade Iraq.”


THE WASHINGTON FRONT


Since 1996, the Washington headquarters of the I.N.C. has been situated in a million-dollar brick row house in Georgetown. The house looks as stately and manicured as its neighbors, but, inside, the carpets on the front stairs are filthy. The day I visited, piles of newspapers were strewn alongside half-empty coffee mugs, and ants carried cookie crumbs across a leather couch, giving the place the atmosphere of a frat house. Padding around in socks and an untucked T-shirt was a sandy-haired, boyishlooking man named Francis Brooke.

For most of the past decade, Brooke has functioned as Chalabi’s unofficial lobbyist in Washington. Brooke, his wife, Sharon, and their children live for free in the town house, which is owned by Levantine Holdings, a Chalabi family corporation based in Luxembourg. Part home, part office, with a succession of Iraqi exiles camping out in the basement, this was the place from which Chalabi spearheaded a sophisticated marketing operation that Brooke described proudly as “an amazing success.” As he put it, “This war would not have been fought if it had not been for Ahmad.”

Brooke, who is a devout Christian, has brought an evangelical ardor to the cause of defeating Saddam. “I do have a religious motivation for doing what I do,” Brooke said. “I see Iraq as our neighbor. And the Bible says, When your neighbor is in a ditch, God means for you to help him.”

After graduating from Duke University, in 1983, Brooke worked briefly for the unsuccessful Georgia senatorial campaign of Hamilton Jordan, who had been Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Brooke then became a representative for the beer industry. (“If you want to understand constituent politics, you should try mobilizing opinion against a beer tax,” he said.) But in 1991 he took a public-relations job with an American firm in London called the Rendon Group, which described its specialty as “perception management.” The company had been founded by John Rendon, a former executive director of the Democratic National Committee. It didn’t take long for Brooke to realize that the project he was assigned at Rendon was funded by the C.I.A. Brooke, who at the time was thirty years old, said that he was paid twenty-two thousand dollars a month.

The genesis of Brooke’s assignment was the decision not to unseat Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Gulf War. In May, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed a covert “lethal finding” that authorized the C.I.A. to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.” Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer who was assigned to Iraq at the time, said that the policy was all show, “like an ape beating its chest. No one had any expectation of marching into Baghdad and killing Saddam. It was an impossibility.” Nonetheless, the C.I.A. had received an influx of cash, and it decided to create an external opposition movement to Saddam.

The C.I.A. had been forced to abolish domestic operations after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies, and it had folded many of its overseas programs when the Cold War ended. So it outsourced the Iraq project to the Rendon Group. According to Brooke, the company signed a secret contract with the C.I.A. which guaranteed that it would receive a ten-per-cent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spent. The arrangement was an incentive to spend millions. “We tried to burn through forty million dollars a year,” Brooke said. “It was a very nice job.”

From an office near Victoria Station, the Rendon Group set out to influence global political opinion against Saddam. Given Saddam’s record of atrocities against his own people, it wasn’t a hard sell. “It was a campaign environment, with a lot of young people, and no set hierarchy,” Brooke recalled. “It was great. We had a real competitive advantage. We knew something about the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and how to manage a media campaign. CNN was new at that point. No one else knew how to do these things, but Rendon was great at issue campaigns.” The group began offering information to British journalists, and many articles subsequently appeared in the London press. Occasionally, he said, the company would be reprimanded by project managers in Washington when too many of those stories were picked up by the American press, thereby transgressing laws that prohibited domestic propaganda. But, for the most part, Brooke said, “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic.”

In addition to generating anti-Saddam news stories and creating a travelling “atrocity exhibit,” which documented the human-rights abuses of Saddam’s regime, the Rendon Group was charged with the delicate task of helping to create a viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam. “That is when I first met Dr. Chalabi,” Brooke said.

Chalabi, who had become an international banker and financier, had surfaced almost immediately as the C.I.A.’s favored opposition figure. As Frank Anderson, a former agency official, said, “Chalabi had rare administrative competence.” A secular Shiite who was passionately dedicated to overthrowing Saddam, he spoke excellent English, dressed elegantly, and was well organized and impressively connected. He also displayed a facility for backroom political maneuvering. He wasn’t popular with other exiles, however. According to a former I.N.C. member, in June, 1992, the Iraqi National Congress held one of its first organizational meetings, in Vienna; Chalabi didn’t win enough backing to qualify for a seat on the fifteen-member board. By the time attendees returned from the meeting, however, Chalabi’s name had somehow been added to the list of members. (Chalabi claims that support for him was unanimous.) His management of the group, other exiles complained, was similarly impervious to the democratic will.

The C.I.A.’s sponsorship of Chalabi came at an opportune moment. He had recently been convicted, in absentia, by a military court in Jordan for his part in a spectacular bank fraud that imperilled the country’s fragile economy. With the help of the U.S. government, Chalabi was able to recast himself from an accused swindler to a charismatic political leader and a champion of liberal democratic values.


THE JORDAN AFFAIR


Ahmad Chalabi was born on October 30, 1944, into one of Iraq’s wealthiest and most influential Shiite families. When the 1958 revolution forced his family into exile, it lost much of its fortune, including what Chalabi said were “a million-plus square metres of land” of prime property in central Baghdad, which he now intends to reclaim. He told an American friend that his father, before going into exile, had had more land and industrial power than anyone else in Iraq. His forebears leveraged their fortune into political clout by performing favors for the powerful, such as paying off the personal debts of the royal family. In his lifetime, Chalabi’s grandfather held posts in nine Cabinets. Chalabi’s father was president of the senate and an adviser to the king.

Imad Khadduri, an Iraqi exile who now lives in Canada, and who was a schoolmate of Chalabi’s at a Jesuit academy in Baghdad, told me that Chalabi’s grandfather kept his own personal prison, in which he incarcerated serfs who failed to pay taxes or produce wheat. (Chalabi’s office denies this assertion.) Chalabi, he recalled, was a “very bright” young man, but also a sore loser. “He threw a tantrum when he didn’t get the highest grades.” When Chalabi was thirteen, the Iraqi Communist Party and the Army overthrew the royal family, and he was sent to Jordan for safety. Thus began thirty-four years of exile. Khadduri, who severed his friendship with Chalabi after he learned of his ties to the C.I.A, said, “Ahmad wanted to avenge his father’s ouster and the deprivation of his lands. Now he’s trying to fit in his father’s shoes, like your little Bush.”

After attending boarding school in England, Chalabi went to America to study math. Upon finishing his Ph.D., which was in the rarefied branch of geometry known as knot theory, Chalabi moved to Lebanon, to teach math at the American University in Beirut. In 1977, however, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited him to found a new bank in the country, whose financial sector was largely dominated by Palestinians. With the help of royal patronage and of innovations previously unavailable in Jordan, such as consumer credit cards, computerized banking, and A.T.M.s, the company created by Chalabi, Petra Bank, grew impressively. Within a decade, it had become the second-largest bank in Jordan, and Chalabi became a rich and well-connected man in Amman. Like his father and grandfather, he extended easy credit to important benefactors. He boasted to an American friend that he had personally made Prince Hassan, the King’s brother, “a wealthy man.” (Prince Hassan, who continues to regard Chalabi as a friend, declined to be interviewed.) Chalabi lived with his family in the suburban hills outside Amman, in a house of his own design, surrounded by a collection of modern art. His children rode horses with the royal family. In his spare time, he pursued a variety of intellectual passions. Judith Kipper, the director of the Middle East Forum at the Council on Foreign Relations, remembers bumping into him in Cairo; he had come with his math books, he told her, to try to figure out how the pyramids had been built.

In 1989, however, Chalabi’s comfortable life collapsed amid allegations of criminality. Jordan’s Central Bank, facing a liquidity crisis, demanded that the country’s banks place thirty per cent of their foreign currency in its accounts. Petra balked, prompting an emergency audit. Chalabi betrayed little outward concern about this sudden turn. Patrick Theros, a former Ambassador to Qatar, who was then stationed in Jordan, had dinner at Chalabi’s home during this period. “He was completely charming, particularly to the ladies—he could talk about any subject,” Theros recalled. Two days later, Chalabi, who had apparently been tipped off about his impending arrest, fled. He forfeited many of his family’s assets, and resettled with his wife, Leila, and their four children in London.

On April 9, 1992, a military tribunal in Jordan delivered a two-hundred-and-twenty-three-page verdict, which concluded that Chalabi was guilty of thirty-one charges, including embezzlement, theft, forgery, currency speculation, making false statements, and making bad loans to himself, to his friends, and to his family’s other financial enterprises, in Lebanon and Switzerland. The Jordanian docket shows that Chalabi was sentenced to serve twenty-two years of hard labor, and to pay back two hundred and thirty million dollars in embezzled funds. An Arthur Andersen audit commissioned by Jordanian authorities found that the bank had overstated its assets by more than three hundred million dollars. In addition, a hundred and fifty-eight million dollars had disappeared from its accounts, apparently as a result of transactions involving people linked to the former management. (Swiss documents obtained by the Newsweek correspondent Mark Hosenball show that Socofi, an investment firm in Switzerland run by the Chalabi family, also collapsed under suspicious circumstances, leading to pleas of no contest by two of Chalabi’s brothers, Jawad and Hazam, in 2000.)

After Chalabi arrived in England, he claimed that the Petra affair had been a political frameup. He said that he was targeted because he had been an outspoken critic of Saddam (an assertion that is not unlike his recent defense in Baghdad), and claimed that he was indicted because the Jordanians were beholden to Saddam for oil and other economic aid. Chalabi, like many Iraqi exiles living in Jordan, had indeed opposed Saddam openly. However, a well-informed American friend of Chalabi’s could not recall other instances of Saddam forcing Jordan to clamp down on his critics there.

John Markham, a lawyer representing Chalabi, recently forwarded to me a previously undisclosed letter, which Chalabi claims is “the smoking gun” that proves his accusers are lying. During the trial proceedings, the Jordanian military prosecutor wrote to the country’s authorities that “the method of dealing with the Petra Bank and its liquidation was the result of personal hatred and envy.” The prosecutor blamed Said Nabulsi, the head of Jordan’s Central Bank. According to Markham, Nabulsi was complicit with Saddam.

In Jordan, banking officials scoff at Chalabi’s claims of innocence. Petra had opened a subsidiary in Washington, D.C., in 1983, and after the bank’s collapse, according to a top Jordanian finance official, investigators combed America for forty-five days, trying to locate the bank’s hidden assets. Almost all the assets listed on the books, the official said, were worthless, except for an auxiliary office that was listed as a repository for valuable bank records. The investigators soon discovered that the “office” was a country estate with a swimming pool, in Middleburg, Virginia. It belonged to the Chalabi family, which was charging the bank a monthly rent. “There was not one business record in the whole place,” the official said. “This man is a vicious liar. There is no end to it. It’s like you find someone killing with a gun in his hand, and he says he’s innocent. He just wears you down.” The official declined to be named, because he feared Chalabi’s influence. “He has more powerful friends in Washington than you or me,” he said, adding, “Really, some of your people are such suckers.”



By 1993, with the C.I.A.’s support, Chalabi had solidified his role as the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Before long, however, financial questions arose. A former I.N.C. associate said, “The agency didn’t know how he spent his money. All transactions were cash.” Kurds who had joined the I.N.C. complained that Chalabi wouldn’t tell them anything about the group’s finances. A Kurdish leader said that Chalabi “snapped” when asked about debts that were still owed to Kurds, and argued that he couldn’t disclose funding details because his financing was “covert.” A former C.I.A. officer said that successive audits identified no wrongdoing. But the I.N.C.’s finances weren’t easy to inspect. At one point, he said, I.N.C. officials “refused to coöperate with an audit because they argued that it would breach the secrecy of the operation.” On one occasion, a team of government auditors was spirited into the offices of the I.N.C. at night. “It was a real headache,” he recalled. The auditors found that the books were in order, but that many expenditures were wasteful.

Some observers of the I.N.C. wondered what return the U.S. government was getting for its multimillion-dollar investment. In 1994 and 1995, Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. officer, met Chalabi several times in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, an autonomous area protected from Saddam by the United States. Chalabi had established an outpost in Kurdistan. “He was like the American Ambassador to Iraq,” Baer recalled. “He could get to the White House and the C.I.A. He would move around Iraq with five or six Land Cruisers.” But Baer added that Chalabi’s long absence from Iraq diminished his power there, and his ineffectiveness made him a useful foil for Saddam. “If he was dangerous, they could have killed him at any time. He was the perfect opposition leader,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing each month “to this shadowy operator—in cars, salaries—and it was just a Potemkin village,” Baer said. “He was reporting no intel; it was total trash. The I.N.C.’s intelligence was so bad, we weren’t even sending it in.” Chalabi’s agenda, he said, was to convince the United States that Saddam’s regime was “a leaking warehouse of gas, and all we had to do was light a match.” But when the agency tried to check Chalabi’s assertions about troop movement or palace plans, Baer said, “there was no detail, no sourcing—you couldn’t see it on a satellite.”

In retrospect, one detail of Chalabi’s operation seems particularly noteworthy. In 1994, Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit “a forgery shop” that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. “It was something like a spy novel,” Baer said. “It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in.” Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, “he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam.” In the Los Angeles Times, Hugh Pope wrote of one harmless-seeming prank that emerged from Chalabi’s specialty shop: a precise mockup of an Iraqi newspaper that was filled with stories about Saddam’s human-rights abuses. Another faked document ended up directly affecting Baer. It was a copy of a forged letter to Chalabi, made to look as if it were written on the stationery of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The letter asked for Chalabi’s help in an American-led assassination plot against Saddam. “It was a complete fake,” Baer said, adding that he believed it was an effort to hoodwink the Iranians into joining a plot against Saddam; an indication of American involvement, Chalabi hoped, would convince them that the effort was serious. Brooke acknowledged that the I.N.C. had run a forgery shop, but denied that Chalabi had created the phony assassination letter. “That would be illegal,” he said. To Baer’s dismay, the letter eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, and the C.I.A. accused him of being involved in the scheme. Baer said he had to pass a polygraph test in order to prove otherwise.


CHALABI VS. THE C.I.A.


In 1995, Chalabi began spending some of his C.I.A. funding to create an armed militia in Kurdistan. With Washington’s approval, he hatched a quixotic plan to use his militia, along with tribal leaders he had bribed, to mount a simultaneous three-city strike against Saddam’s forces. Just before the attack began, it became clear that Baathist officials had learned of the plot. Baer was told to tell Chalabi that “any decision to proceed will be on your own.” Chalabi, who had no military experience, refused to abort the operation. By then, many of the insurgents had deserted, and the revolt quickly foundered. The C.I.A. was furious that it had funded such a folly.

A year later, in August, 1996, a second disaster befell Chalabi. One of the Kurdish factions within the I.N.C. invited Saddam Hussein into Kurdistan, to crush a rival faction that was allied with Chalabi. Forty thousand Iraqi soldiers and three hundred tanks crossed into Kurdish territory—a flagrant violation of U.S. strictures against Saddam’s entering Kurdistan. The Clinton Administration failed to react immediately, and Saddam’s forces captured, tortured, and slaughtered hundreds of Chalabi’s supporters. The U.S. government eventually evacuated seven thousand supporters.

Francis Brooke told me that, when he heard the news, “I was sick for a week, just throwing up.” He had been involved in an exchange of letters between Chalabi and Vice-President Al Gore, in which Gore promised to protect the democratic resistance in northern Iraq. Brooke felt responsible for the carnage. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I’m not interested in getting a whole lot of people killed and being morally wrong. I was stunned.” He called Chalabi, who was in London at the time, and asked, “What are we going to do?”

Chalabi and Brooke decided to seek revenge through the press. Using the skills he had honed while working for the C.I.A., Brooke helped ABC News put together a documentary that was highly critical of the C.I.A.’s missteps in northern Iraq. “It pissed them off in the biggest way,” Brooke said. Afterward, a close associate recalled, “The agency stopped supplying him.”

Chalabi’s desire to bring about an invasion of Iraq was undiminished, but, with the loss of covert support, he had to find benefactors in Congress. “We needed a new campaign,” Brooke said, and “Chalabi was a great candidate. He’d spent his whole life getting ready for this.”

In 1996, Chalabi and Brooke set up shop in Georgetown, and mapped out a strategy. They studied how the African National Congress had won mainstream support, by portraying apartheid as tantamount to slavery. They also examined how various American Jewish groups organized themselves to support Israel. “We knew we had to create a domestic constituency with some electoral clout, so we decided to use the aipac model,” Brooke said, referring to the American Israel Political Action Committee.

In June, 1997, Chalabi gave a speech at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, in Washington. He told the audience that it would be easy to topple Saddam and replace him with a government that was friendly to Israel, if the U.S. would provide minimal support to an armed insurgency organized by the I.N.C. Although Chalabi later denied that oil had played a role in his campaign, he gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in 1998 in which he spoke of restoring the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa, which had been inoperative since the creation of Israel, in 1948.

Chalabi’s pitch stirred enthusiasm and curiosity among a group of American neoconservatives who had played crucial roles in the first Bush Administration but were now scattered among Washington think tanks. After the fall of Communism, the neoconservatives were eager for a new cause, and Chalabi—an educated, secular Shiite who was accepting of Israel and talked about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East—capitalized on their enthusiasm. Judith Kipper, the Council on Foreign Relations director, said that, around this time, Chalabi made “a deliberate decision to turn to the right,” having realized that conservatives were more likely than liberals to back the use of force against Saddam.

As Brooke put it, “We thought very carefully about this, and realized there were only a couple of hundred people” in Washington who were influential in shaping policy toward Iraq. He and Chalabi set out to win these people over. Before long, Chalabi was on a first-name basis with thirty members of Congress, such as Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, and was attending social functions with Richard Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, who was now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dick Cheney, who was the C.E.O. of Halliburton. According to Brooke, “From the beginning, Cheney was in philosophical agreement with this plan. Cheney has said, ‘Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.’”

Wolfowitz was particularly taken with Chalabi, an American friend of Chalabi’s said. “Chalabi really charmed him. He told me they are both intellectuals. Paul is a bit of a dreamer.” To Wolfowitz, Chalabi must have seemed an ideal opposition figure. “He just thought, This is cool—he says all the right stuff about democracy and human rights. I wonder if we can’t roll Saddam, just the way we did the Soviets,” the friend said.

Chalabi was running out of money, however, and he needed new patrons. Brooke said that he and Chalabi hit upon a notion that, he admitted, was “naked politics”: the I.N.C.’s disastrous history of foiled C.I.A. operations under the Clinton Administration could be turned into a partisan weapon for the Republicans. “Clinton gave us a huge opportunity,” Brooke said. “We took a Republican Congress and pitted it against a Democratic White House. We really hurt and embarrassed the President.” The Republican leadership in Congress, he conceded, “didn’t care that much about the ammunition. They just wanted to beat up the President.” Nonetheless, he said, senior Republican senators, including Trent Lott and Jesse Helms, “were very receptive, right away.”

Congressional hearings on the C.I.A.’s failures in Iraq were held in 1998, and Chalabi’s think-tank allies, such as Richard Perle, gave testimony that excoriated the Clinton Administration. Meanwhile, Chalabi continued to gather intelligence from Iraq that would further his cause. He found an opportunity in the U.N.’s weapons-inspection program, which had been set up in 1991 to prevent Saddam from developing weapons of mass destruction. On January 27, 1998, Chalabi met in London with Scott Ritter, who was then working as a liaison for the U.N. program. At the time, the U.N. had been unable to account for a number of weapons—including nearly nine thousand litres of anthrax—that Saddam’s regime said it had dismantled. U.N. inspectors had exhausted other sources of intelligence. Chalabi claimed to have operatives who had penetrated Saddam’s circle, and offered to help.

The meeting took place in Chalabi’s apartment, on Conduit Street in Mayfair. Half a dozen Arab servants served tea, Ritter recalled. Chalabi sat on a couch, taking notes, “playing the overlord.” (Ahmed Alawi, an I.N.C. official, also attended the meeting.)

“I should have asked him what he could give me,” Ritter said. “Instead, I let him ask me, ‘What do you need?’” The result, he said, was that “we made the biggest mistake in the intelligence business: we identified all of our gaps.” Over the next several hours, Ritter said, he outlined most of the U.N. inspectors’ capabilities and theories, telling Chalabi how they had searched for underground bunkers with ground-penetrating radar. He also told Chalabi of his suspicion that Saddam may have had mobile chemical- or biological-weapons laboratories, which would explain why investigators hadn’t been able to find them. “We made that up!” Ritter said. “We told Chalabi, and, lo and behold, he’s fabricated a source for the mobile labs.” (The I.N.C. has been accused of sponsoring a source who claimed knowledge of mobile labs.) When Ritter left the U.N., in August, 1998, there was still no evidence of mobile weapons laboratories. Chalabi’s people, Ritter said, eventually supplied detailed intelligence on Saddam’s alleged W.M.D. programs, but “it was all crap.”

Ritter had one other memorable encounter with Chalabi. Six months after the London meeting, Ritter was feeling dispirited. U.N. investigators had discovered trace evidence of VX nerve gas on warheads in Iraq; he was concerned that Saddam was still hiding something. Chalabi invited him to the town house in Georgetown, and they discussed the VX discovery. Chalabi then talked to Ritter about doing intelligence work for the I.N.C. In a demonstration of his seriousness, he showed Ritter two studies advocating Saddam’s overthrow. One was a military plan, written, in part, by a conservative friend, retired General Wayne Downing, who had commanded the Special Forces in the first Gulf War. The study suggested that Iraqi insurgents would be able to topple Saddam almost by themselves. Since the plan required few American troops, it could be easily sold to Congress. Ritter, a former marine, told me that he wasn’t impressed. He recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t think the small units could do the jobs you’re saying. It’s a ploy’” to get the Americans involved. Chalabi, he said, did not deny it. “So how come the fact that you’d need more American assistance is not in the plan?” Ritter asked. “Because it’s too sensitive,” Chalabi replied.

According to Ritter, Chalabi went on to describe a clear vision of Iraq’s future—with himself in charge. Ritter said, “He told me that, if I played ball, when he became President he’d control all of the oil concessions, and he’d make sure I was well taken care of. I guess it was supposed to be a sweetener.” Chalabi’s office denied Ritter’s account, calling him a “liar.” Ritter left without agreeing to work for Chalabi.


A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN


On October 7, 1998, the Iraq Liberation Act, which had been drafted by Trent Lott and other Republicans, passed in Congress almost unanimously. Chalabi, Brooke, and their allies in Congress crafted the legislation together. The act’s call for “regime change” in Iraq was radical, yet it created remarkably little controversy, because Chalabi had once again shrewdly pitched the removal of Saddam as a project by and for Iraqis, requiring minimal air support from the U.S. At this time, Congress also passed bills giving overt support of ninety-seven million dollars to the I.N.C.

Shortly after the act’s passage, General Anthony Zinni, who was then the commander of centcom, which is assigned operational control of U.S. combat forces in the Middle East, saw a copy of Chalabi’s military plan. “It got me pretty angry,” he told me. Zinni knew Iraq’s terrain well, and testified before Congress that Chalabi’s plan was “pie in the sky, a fairy tale.” He said, “They were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground Saddam’s regime will collapse, they won’t fight. I said, ‘I fly over them every day, and they shoot at us. We hit them, and they shoot at us again. No way a thousand forces would end it.’ The exile group was giving them inaccurate intelligence. Their scheme was ridiculous.”

When the Bush Administration took office, in 2001, neoconservatives such as Wolfowitz and Perle were restored to power. Brooke told me that in February of that year Wolfowitz called him late one night and promised that this time Saddam would be deposed. Brooke said that Wolfowitz told him he was so committed to this goal that he would resign if he couldn’t accomplish it. (Wolfowitz called this account “nonsense.”)

After the attacks of September 11th, many in the Administration began to consider a preëmptive strike against Saddam’s regime, and they eagerly received Chalabi’s intelligence briefings. In 2002, an Information Collection Program for I.N.C. intelligence, which had been funded by the State Department, was transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, a division of the Pentagon. “Chalabi was the crutch the neocons leaned on to justify their intervention,” Zinni said. “He twisted the intelligence that they based it on, and provided a picture so rosy and unrealistic they thought it would be easy.”

The C.I.A. remained skeptical of the defectors that the I.N.C. was promoting, and insisted on examining them independently. President Bush was informed of the C.I.A.’s view of Chalabi soon after taking office, but he ultimately sided with Vice-President Cheney and the neocons. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, Bush and Cheney both referred in public addresses to Saddam’s mobile weapons laboratories. Six weeks before the U.S. invasion, in a February 5, 2003, address to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell—who had initially found the intelligence on W.M.D.s inconclusive—spoke of unnamed eyewitnesses, one of whom had supplied “firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails.” It was, he testified, “one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq.”

Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, of the Los Angeles Times, recently reported that the source of this intelligence was an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, who is allegedly the brother of one of Chalabi’s aides. (Chalabi says that the defector is not related to anyone in his organization.) Curveball is said to have approached German intelligence officials and provided them with detailed maps and descriptions of mobile weapons labs. Curveball neglected to tell German officials that before fleeing Iraq he had been jailed for embezzlement. Moreover, U.S. and U.N. experts searched every corner of Iraq for the mobile labs; all they found were two trucks, whose function is still in dispute. Last January, Cheney cited those trucks as conclusive proof that Iraq had mobile weapons labs, but experts have said that they more likely contained equipment for weather balloons.

By the time I asked Chalabi about Curveball, the defector had become a sore subject. “These are the sorts of reports we are expected to deny?” he asked, his voice rising. “Anonymous reports about anonymous people? No one even knows who this person is! How are we supposed to know?” Chalabi questioned why he was being blamed for defectors’ inaccuracies, when it was the U.S. intelligence community’s job “to check these people out.” He asked, “What would you want us to do? Hush it up when these people tell us these things?”

Others at the I.N.C. were emphatic that the organization had no ties to German intelligence. But Vincent Cannistraro, the former counter-terrorism specialist, told me that the C.I.A. now believes that Aras Habib, the I.N.C. intelligence chief suspected of giving U.S. secrets to Iran, “arranged for Curveball to be presented to the Germans.” He added, “The C.I.A. is positive of it.”

After the war, even Chalabi’s sponsors at the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that most of the information they had received from his defectors was “of little or no value.” According to the Times, in early 2003, an official agency report concluded that several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence by the I.N.C. had falsely claimed to have direct knowledge of illicit weapons programs in Iraq.

Chalabi and his supporters have argued that critics like Zinni have inflated the exiles’ role in offering misleading intelligence about W.M.D.s. “How can we be blamed for the failure of the entire world’s intelligence?” Chalabi asked me. Certainly, there is blame to share, most notably among the war’s civilian planners in the Department of Defense and the White House, who flouted intelligence protocol by accepting the I.N.C.’s information without rigorous vetting. As Robert Baer, the former C.I.A. official, put it, “Chalabi was scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed.”



An internal I.N.C. document reveals how influential the Information Collection Program was. On June 26, 2002, Entifadh Qanbar, an I.N.C. official, sent a memo to the Senate Appropriations Committee, in which he gave the I.N.C. credit for “product” cited in a hundred and eight English-language news stories that appeared between October, 2001, and May, 2002. These articles, the letter said, relayed I.N.C. information collected from “defectors, reports, and raw intelligence” about Iraq. In addition, Qanbar wrote, the I.N.C. provided its raw information directly to “U.S. government recipients,” including William Luti, at the Pentagon, and John Hannah, the special assistant for national security in the Office of the Vice-President.

The news stories in which the I.N.C. claimed to have placed its “product” include some of the most disputed journalism to appear in the prelude to the war. On December 20, 2001, Judith Miller published a front-page story in the Times about an Iraqi engineer who claimed to have direct knowledge of twenty secret chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons sites in Iraq. One site, he said, was hidden under a hospital. He also described tests of these prohibited weapons on live Kurdish and Shiite prisoners. Miller disclosed in her story that the I.N.C. had helped the engineer to leave Iraq, and had arranged the interview, and that the I.N.C.’s agenda was to overthrow Saddam Hussein. She also noted that U.S. officials were “trying to verify” the defector’s claims. Despite these caveats, Miller reported that “experts said the information seemed reliable and significant.” In a subsequent piece, she wrote that the same defector had given U.S. intelligence officials “dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases.”

The defector’s name is Adnan Ihsan Saheed al-Haideri. Since the war, neither U.N. weapons inspectors nor David Kay, a top U.S. weapons inspector, have found evidence to confirm his accounts. According to a recent Knight Ridder report, American officials escorted Haideri back to Iraq after the war, but he failed to locate any prohibited-weapons facilities. The I.N.C. reportedly provided Miller with the exclusive Haideri story three days after he had shown deception in a polygraph test administered by the C.I.A. at the request of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

When asked about Haideri’s credibility problems, a Chalabi aide who declined to be named disputed the polygraph story, saying that D.I.A. officials had told him that Haideri “was a gold mine” of information, and that “even if only three per cent of it was true” it was worthwhile.

Miller declined to comment on her Iraq coverage, as did other officials at the Times. For months, the Times has been criticized for its prewar coverage of the W.M.D. debate. On May 26th, the paper published an editor’s note acknowledging that it had been improperly influenced by Chalabi. “Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted,” the note said. “It looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in.”

In an unusual arrangement, two months before the invasion began, the chief correspondent for the Times, Patrick E. Tyler, who was in charge of overseeing the paper’s war coverage, hired Chalabi’s niece, Sarah Khalil, to be the paper’s office manager in Kuwait. Chalabi had long been a source for Tyler. Chalabi’s daughter Tamara, who was in Kuwait at the time, told me that Khalil helped her father’s efforts while she was working for the Times.

In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation. Once again, the assistance of the U.S. military had backfired. Chalabi used a satellite phone to call Khalil for help. According to Tamara, Khalil commandeered money from I.N.C. funds and rounded up a convoy of S.U.V.s, which she herself led across the border into Iraq.

Tyler told me that he hadn’t known that Khalil had helped Chalabi get into southern Iraq. He added that Khalil had a background in journalism, and that Chalabi hadn’t been a factor in the war when he hired her. “We were covering a war, not Chalabi,” he said. The Times dismissed Khalil on May 20, 2003, when word of her employment reached editors in New York. During the five months that Khalil was employed, Tyler published nine pieces that mentioned Chalabi. When asked about Khalil’s rescue of Chalabi, William Schmidt, an associate managing editor of the Times, said, “The Times is not aware of any such story, or whether it happened. If so, it was out of bounds.”



Another story promoted by Chalabi’s organization offered an unsubstantiated link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The I.N.C. disseminated a story that Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had met in Prague in April, 2001, with an Iraqi intelligence agent. In February, 2002, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair that a defector named Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy said that he had worked at a terrorist camp in Iraq called Salman Pak, where non-Iraqi fundamentalist Arabs were trained to hijack planes and land helicopters on moving trains. He also asserted that Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague. Rose noted the I.N.C. had sponsored Qurairy, and wrote that an aide of Chalabi’s served as the translator for the defector.

On November 12, 2001, the I.N.C. provided another defector, Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, to the press through a video feed from London. Lami, who was described as a former colonel in Saddam’s Army, claimed that Islamic militants were training at Salman Pak. He also said that the training camp was contaminated by anthrax, an accusation that was made soon after the U.S. began investigating incidents of anthrax poisoning in New York, Florida, and elsewhere. Stories about Lami subsequently appeared in the Washington Times, the Seattle Times, and other papers. Since the overthrow of Saddam, no foreign terrorist-training camps have been found in Iraq.

The I.N.C. was equally successful in disseminating its stories to U.S. government officials. Haideri’s tale found its way into an official White House study, called “A Decade of Deception and Defiance,” which was released as supporting material for an address on Iraq that President Bush delivered before the U.N. on September 12, 2002. Haideri “supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contacts, complete with technical specifications,” the study said.

Chalabi denied that he or his aides, in order to build their case, coached witnesses or in other ways twisted information. “We didn’t mislead anyone,” he said. “We said we had information. We didn’t say the information was great. We thought it would be useful.” He stopped short of saying that he believed the defectors’ stories. “I believed they were who they said they were,” he said. No defector has come forward to say that Chalabi knowingly spread false stories.

The case of Khidhir Hamza, however, illuminates how information can become propaganda. Hamza is a nuclear scientist who served as a senior administrator in Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program during the nineteen-eighties. He defected from Iraq in 1994. He was at first spurned by the C.I.A., which thought he knew little of interest. In 1997, he was asked to join the Institute for Science and International Security, an organization in Washington run by David Albright, a former nuclear-weapons inspector. When Hamza first started working with him, Albright told me, his information seemed reliable. In 1998, Hamza even helped debunk an inflated story offered by another defector, just as Chalabi was trying to drum up support for the Iraq Liberation Act. “We saw the claws of Chalabi then,” Albright said. Someone from the I.N.C., he said, called to upbraid Hamza, telling him that he had undercut the cause of liberating Iraq. “Hamza was shaken, and said he’d never do that again,” Albright told me.

In 1999, Hamza left Albright’s institute to write a memoir, “Saddam’s Bombmaker,” with Jeff Stein, a Washington-based author. According to Albright, many of the claims in the book, including those about the importance of Hamza’s role, “were just ridiculous.” Hamza, who had not been involved in Iraq’s nuclear program for nearly a decade, asserted that Saddam was within years, and possibly months, of developing a nuclear bomb.

Hamza’s claim was startling. After the first Gulf War, the U.S. learned that Saddam had attempted to build a nuclear weapon. But his nuclear program was later dismantled, and by the mid-nineties most experts believed that this threat had subsided. According to Albright, Francis Brooke “was involved” in promoting Hamza’s book. “It was clear he had a part in it,” he said.

Chalabi’s people helped Hamza to promote his story to the media, and the tale became widely known. Cheney began giving alarmist speeches about the imminent Iraqi nuclear threat. On August 26, 2002, he declared that Saddam had “resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,” and might soon be able to engage in “nuclear blackmail” with his enemies.

Hamza, who had been managing a gas station in Virginia prior to his association with Albright, began taking high-paying speaking engagements. A former Chalabi aide said that many of the defectors who had given hyperbolic accounts were “desperate” people; the I.N.C. offered them a financial lifeline, and, to grab it, “many bent their ethical standards.”

Since the war, no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program has been found. Albright said that Hamza has “been told not to talk about this W.M.D. stuff.” Last spring, Hamza returned to Iraq. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government, had offered him a top post in the Ministry of Science and Technology, which gave him partial control of Iraq’s nuclear industry. According to the London Independent, Hamza failed at the job; he fought with his colleagues and was frequently absent. This spring, the C.P.A. did not renew his contract.



Nine days after the attacks of September 11th, Chalabi addressed a meeting of the Defense Policy Board, an honorary committee of experts that advises Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. At the time, Richard Perle was the group’s chairman. Francis Brooke, who attended the session, said that the Pentagon still smelled of smoke from Al Qaeda’s attack, and that it was “a very emotional meeting.”

Chalabi’s message, which Brooke said the group endorsed, was to skip any intervention in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had harbored Al Qaeda, and to proceed immediately with targeting Iraq. A participant at the meeting, who asked not to be named, recalled that Chalabi made a compelling case that the Americans would have an easy victory there: “He said there’d be no resistance, no guerrilla warfare from the Baathists, and a quick matter of establishing a government.”

Soon afterward, however, Chalabi began to clash with the Administration. Chalabi told me that he would have preferred to sell the war to the American people on philosophical grounds, as a fight against genocidal tyranny and in favor of bringing democracy to the Arab world, but that this approach was rejected by the Bush Administration. “Look, our focus was on Saddam’s crimes, moral crimes, genocide,” Chalabi said. “We were not focussed on W.M.D. The U.S. asked us. We didn’t bring these people up; they asked us! They requested this help from us.” (He refused to name who made the request.) Francis Brooke said that nobody had ordered the I.N.C. to focus solely on W.M.D.s. “I’m a smart man,” he said. “I saw what they wanted, and I adapted my strategy.” Last year, in an interview with Sam Tanenhaus for Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that the W.M.D. evidence was not the best argument for the war, but that for bureaucratic reasons “we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction.”

As a result, the war was largely marketed domestically as a scare campaign, and the I.N.C. was enlisted to promote the danger posed by Saddam’s regime. Brooke said, “I sent out an all-points bulletin to our network, saying, ‘Look, guys, get me a terrorist, or someone who works with terrorists. And, if you can get stuff on W.M.D., send it!’”

In Washington, many of the war’s supporters, including Jim Hoagland and Fouad Ajami, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, have worried about the triumph of political expediency over idealism. These critics claim that a war waged in the name of liberation has become a political damage-control operation. Chalabi himself has attacked the Administration’s plan to transfer sovereignty to an interim government on June 30th as a sham, crafted for Bush’s reëlection campaign and not for the Iraqi people. Considering the nature of the campaign that he and his aides waged to prompt an invasion, however, it’s a bit late for Chalabi to express such qualms. Jack Blum, a former lawyer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me that the Administration compromised its vision from the start, by relying on dubious partners such as Chalabi. He said, “We ruined what could have had some promise by dealing with all the wrong people.”


CORRUPTION IN BAGHDAD


Soon after Chalabi returned to his homeland, in January, 2003, allegations of corruption and criminal behavior began to emerge. A former member of the I.N.C. said that some of Chalabi’s militia, the Free Iraqi Fighters, had been accused of looting and robbing their way into Baghdad. He also said that some members of the militia had stolen a fleet of S.U.V.s that belonged to Saddam’s regime, then sold them abroad. According to police officers in Baghdad, several of Chalabi’s men were taken to the Al Baya station and arrested for stealing cars and having false I.D.s. A C.P.A. official confirmed the incident, and said that more charges might be added. Chalabi didn’t deny that his troops had engaged in some misconduct, but he asked, “What war doesn’t have this? Can you guarantee that no Coalition soldiers looted anything?”

Similar allegations have been made about Chalabi’s “de-Baathification” program, a policy he says he devised to bring justice to those in the Sunni ruling class who had been complicit in Saddam’s crimes. The Defense Intelligence Agency credits Chalabi’s forces with rounding up more than half of the fifty-five Baathists placed on a Most Wanted list by the Pentagon. However, two reliable sources—a former American diplomat and a former member of Chalabi’s militia—said that de-Baathification had devolved into the confiscation of Sunni assets, including houses that were expropriated by Chalabi’s aides. Newsweek reported that an Iraqi official claimed that half a million dollars allocated for de-Baathification had disappeared. Chalabi denied there was any corruption in the program.

Chalabi told me that he had no business interests in Iraq. “I am in politics now,” he said. But several American businessmen involved in ventures in Iraq said that Chalabi had gained a substantial foothold in the country’s financial sector, by insuring that relatives and longtime loyalists held key positions. Chalabi heads the finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council, a U.S.-appointed group of twenty-five people representing Iraq’s religious and ethnic factions; as a result, he was able to install the oil, finance, and trade ministers, as well as the governor of Iraq’s Central Bank. Ali Allawi, the Minister of Trade and Defense, is Chalabi’s nephew. Nabeel Musawi, a former I.N.C. spokesman, is a deputy on the Governing Council. The Central Bank is run by Sinan Shabibi, another close ally. Chalabi had wanted to nominate Mudar Shawkat, his deputy at the I.N.C., as Minister of Finance, but a former associate of Chalabi’s told me that the Iraqi Governing Council had objected. Subsequently, the Los Angeles Times reported, Shawkat was awarded a large stake in a mobile-phone contract.

Several of Chalabi’s friends have been awarded lucrative contracts. Abdul Huda Farouki, a Jordanian-American businessman who lives outside Washington, D.C., has obtained big stakes in two companies, Nour USA and Erinys Iraq, that will be paid millions of dollars to supply the Iraqi Army and to secure the country’s oil infrastructure. Farouki became a friend of Chalabi’s when he took out twelve million dollars in loans from Petra Bank.

An adviser to the Bush Administration in Iraq said that Chalabi had encountered little resistance to his cronyism: “People are scared to death. He may become Prime Minister still, and he has some very fancy friends.”

Peter Galbraith, the former ambassador, has observed that, historically, “the lines drawn between politics and business are different in the Middle East.” Indeed, allegations of cronyism have been made about many other prominent players in Baghdad. Chalabi himself accused the C.P.A. of corruption, telling me, “There are so many bribes and kickbacks!”

For months, Chalabi’s friends in Washington dismissed the allegations against him as petty and unfair. Danielle Pletka, an executive at the American Enterprise Institute, who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, said of the corruption charges, “I don’t know and I’m not sure it matters. No one said you have to be a saint to be a patriot.” But Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. envoy to Iraq, took seriously the criticisms of Chalabi. Brahimi, an Algerian Sunni, is close to the Jordanian leadership who have questioned Chalabi’s honesty since Petra Bank failed. This spring, Brahimi was asked by the White House to form an interim government, and he refused to recruit Chalabi, or any other members of the I.N.C. The White House acquiesced in Brahimi’s refusal, infuriating Chalabi, whose aides refer to the current U.S. strategy as “ABC,” or Anybody But Chalabi. A top State Department official said that, with the Presidential election looming, the White House was so eager to turn the Iraq mess over to the U.N. that Brahimi “could hand us a Safeway list, and we’d give it to him.”



Chalabi lashed out at the U.N. and his American sponsors. He obtained documents related to the U.N.’s Oil for Food program, which has been accused of extensive corruption, and he is now holding an investigation into the allegations. Meanwhile, in an effort to win more street credibility and to forge a new power base, Chalabi has turned his considerable backroom skills to trying to organize a potentially explosive coalition of powerful Shiites, called the Shiite Political Council. Chalabi, who is not religious, spoke to several hundred Shiite leaders in a packed meeting recently. One observer described his reception as “rapturous.” On May 27th, Chalabi participated in a sit-in outside a mosque in Najaf, insisting that the U.S. end its crackdown against Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric. (That afternoon, the U.S. agreed to pull back from Najaf.)

When Chalabi was asked by CNN about his reinvention of himself as a religious leader, he said, “Why is this a concern?” But a former admirer of Chalabi’s was alarmed by his turn toward Shiite nationalism, and said that his actions risked unleashing sectarian political strife that could pitch the country into civil war. He said, “There’s an irresponsibility in how he’s approaching this. It’s reckless. Iraq needs a stable government. But Ahmad’s pushing his private agenda at the cost of the country’s needs.” In Jordan, a former financial official who dealt with Chalabi on Petra Bank said, “He’ll become an imam if he has to!”

Chalabi’s embrace of the Shiite faction of Iraq has fed the speculation that he gave intelligence secrets to Iran, a Shiite theocracy. Aras Habib, the I.N.C. intelligence chief, has long been suspected of spying for Iran. Chalabi and his aides dismissed these rumors, claiming that in 2002 Habib had passed a C.I.A. polygraph test about his relationship with Iran, and that neither he nor Chalabi had access to U.S. classified materials. For many years, Chalabi has been openly collegial with reformist leaders in Iran, such as President Mohammad Khatami, with whom he met last November, in Tehran. He has also admitted to meeting with the head of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security. Immediately before the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi was living in a gated villa in Tehran that he had persuaded the U.S. to purchase as a satellite branch of the I.N.C.

Chalabi claimed that his relationship with Tehran was purely expedient. “There are geopolitical reasons to be friendly with Iran,” he said. “Iran has the longest border with Iraq. Also, Iran is a much stronger state than Iraq, with three times the population. So strategically it’s not a good idea to be on bad terms. My good relations were not a secret from the U.S.”

But, at a moment when President Bush was struggling with multiple political burdens, Chalabi had become an inconvenient friend. “We got between a President and his reëlection,” Brooke, who was in Baghdad last week with Chalabi, said. Tamara Chalabi told me that her father’s problems could be traced to the fact that “a foreigner, and an Arab, had beaten the Administration at their own game, in their own back yard.”

Chalabi’s political future is unclear. Iraqis have long seen him as an American puppet with no constituency at home; in polls, they have given Chalabi approval ratings lower than those for Saddam Hussein. Peter Galbraith said, “Most likely, his legacy is that he is the Moses of Iraq: he got to see the Promised Land, but not to taste the fruit.” Yet the raid on his home may have given him an opportunity to recast himself once again, now as a dissenting voice on American policy in Iraq. “He’s extremely shrewd politically,” Danielle Pletka said. “His obit has been written many times before, and he keeps clawing his way out of the grave and coming back.” One of his I.N.C. confidants told me that Chalabi might spend the summer repositioning himself as a fierce critic of Brahimi’s interim government, with an eye toward the coming election. Chalabi himself was less specific when I asked him about his plans. He said simply, “I think I have more of a future than the C.P.A.”








- posted by Joshua Landis @ Monday, May 31, 2004