Hitchens Hearts Chalabi

Cristopher Hitchins has published what equates to a Chalabi puff-piece on Slate today. More specifically, it rightly calls into debate the left's insistence that Chalabi is a master-manipulator who had conned the neoconservative movement into a war through fraudulent practice and misinformation. I say "rightly" because, franly, Hitchins is right, but he's also missing the fact that the debate does not rely on Chalabi's presumed fraud. Rather, the neoconservatives adopted and funded Chalabi because he presented and represented an opportunity they could use to exploit their agenda- Chalabi's role in the motivation for the war in Iraq is not one of fraud and manipulation, exactly; it is, rather, much more frightening- it is one of convergence between Chalabi's self-righteous agenda to overthrow Saddam Hussein for his personal power-trip and the ideological desire of teh neoconservatives to enforce democracy and open markets. Chalabi didn't manipulate American interests: his interests happened to be in parallel to the ideological interests of a certain well-funded group of American neoconservatives.

Hitchins:

It was, of course, the sinuous and dastardly forces of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress who persuaded the entire Senate to take leave of its senses in 1998. I know at least one of its two or three staffers, who actually admits to having engaged in the plan. By the same alchemy and hypnotism, the INC was able to manipulate the combined intelligence services of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, as well as the CIA, the DIA, and the NSA, who between them employ perhaps 1.4 million people, and who in the American case dispose of an intelligence budget of $44 billion, with only a handful of Iraqi defectors and an operating budget of $320,000 per month. That's what you have to believe.

A few little strokes of Occam's razor are enough to dispose of this whole accumulation of fantasy. Suppose that every single Iraqi defector or informant, funneled out of a closed and terrified society by the INC, had been a dedicated and conscious fabricator. How could they persuade a vast organization, equipped with satellite surveillance that can almost read a license plate from orbit, of a plain untruth? (Leave to one side the useful intelligence that was provided by the INC and that has been acknowledged.) Well, what was the likelihood that ambiguous moves made by Saddam's agents were also innocuous moves? After decades in which the Baathists had been caught cheating and concealing, what room was there for the presumption of innocence? Hans Blix, the see-no-evil expert who had managed to certify Iraq and North Korea as kosher in his time, has said in print that he fully expected a coalition intervention to uncover hidden weaponry.

Occam's razor is always interesting tool to bring out, particularly because one can assume that one's own usage of Occam's razor is the only possible solution to the question at hand. But which will really be easier to understand in simple terms of motivation: that Chalabi's position was so justified by fact that he could not have possibly have been the only defector to provide this information; or that Chalabi's life-long goal happened be the correct shape to fill the hole that the neoconservative agenda had created in its agenda of exporting democracy? Chalabi found himself with a very friendly audience who shared his motivated interests in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. It's as simple as that.

The problem then becomes this: Hitchins is right to criticize the factions of the left who claim Chalabi fraudulently led the country to invade Iraq; or that the Bush Administration had predetermined it would use the IRC's information to invade before it was elected. Neither of these are correct, wholly, nor are they useful ways to examine the Invasion. It is, rather, much much worse than that, because both incidences, Chalabi's influence of American conservative think tanks which then came to power and America's invasion of Iraq, are privy to one very dangerous precedent:

Opportunism.

In this manner, Chalabi has been utterly consistent. His life is filled with political and ethical opportunism, none of which would be acceptible. He has been convicted in absentia of the largest bank fraud Jordanian history; has faced several legal woes in Iraq; and, when the opportunity arose, he opened secret connections to Iran, connections which have led to office raids by, yes, American intelligence agents. He is currently under investigation by several US agencies.

So, as Salon published in May of 2004, Chalabi's "con" of the neocons was not one of fraud, but was entirely consistent with the shady opportunism he has exhibited as recently as last week: he shrewdly, simply, told the neocons what they wanted to hear at the time he wanted them to hear it:

When the definitive history of the current Iraq war is finally written, wealthy exile Ahmed Chalabi will be among those judged most responsible for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. More than a decade ago Chalabi teamed up with American neoconservatives to sell the war as the cornerstone of an energetic new policy to bring democracy to the Middle East -- and after 9/11, as the crucial antidote to global terrorism. It was Chalabi who provided crucial intelligence on Iraqi weaponry to justify the invasion, almost all of which turned out to be false, and laid out a rosy scenario about the country's readiness for an American strike against Saddam that led the nation's leaders to predict -- and apparently even believe -- that they would be greeted as liberators. Chalabi also promised his neoconservative patrons that as leader of Iraq he would make peace with Israel, an issue of vital importance to them. A year ago, Chalabi was riding high, after Saddam Hussein fell with even less trouble than expected.

Now his power is slipping away, and some of his old neoconservative allies -- whose own political survival is looking increasingly shaky as the U.S. occupation turns nightmarish -- are beginning to turn on him. The U.S. reversed its policy of excluding former Baathists from the Iraqi army -- a policy devised by Chalabi -- and Marine commanders even empowered former Republican Guard officers to run the pacification of Fallujah. Last week United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi delivered a devastating blow to Chalabi's future leadership hopes, recommending that the Iraqi Governing Council, of which he is finance chair, be accorded no governance role after the June 30 transition to sovereignty. Meanwhile, administration neoconservatives, once united behind Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress he founded, are now split, as new doubts about his long-stated commitment to a secular Iraqi democracy with ties to Israel, and fears that he is cozying up to his Shiite co-religionists in Iran, begin to emerge. At least one key Pentagon neocon is said to be on his way out, a casualty of the battle over Chalabi and the increasing chaos in Iraq, and others could follow.

If Hitchins defends Chalabi, that tells us more about Hitchins' perspective than anything- he's willing to compromise a reasonable assessment of the historical motivations that led us into war for his ideological mind-stroke, which Chalabi is all-too-willing to administer.

But the problem with Ahmed Chalabi is not Chalabi himself- he's total sleaze, and this should have been determined years ago. But the problem arises when we realize that this convergence determines the neoconservative sleaze as well. Opportunism and ideological motivation- that's all there is to it.