Ahmad Agonistes

By Jason Vest, The American Prospect. Posted May 24, 2004.

There was a story making the rounds in foreign-policy circles last fall about an exchange between two of Ahmad Chalabi's most prominent patrons and detractors -- a juicy bit that rang true, but seemed hopelessly, tantalizingly just beyond the journalistic grasp. Ubiquitous as it had become in the halls of Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, the standard for publication lay in the ability to get verbatim confirmation of the conversational back and forth -- something no one seemed able to satisfactorily secure.

Apparently destined for the realm of apocryphal anecdotes that hacks only laugh about at the bar, the tale suddenly appeared in print via the pen of Washington Post contributor Sally Quinn on November 24, 2003, as the coda to her 6,000-word anointment of Chalabi as a bona fide Washington player:

Not long after Chalabi announced in New York that he was more in agreement with France than with the United States about the timing of Iraqi sovereignty, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz were having a conversation about him.

"He's your guy," Powell told Wolfowitz. "Get him back in his cage."

"I can't control him," replied Wolfowitz.

"Don't [expletive] with me, Paul," said Powell.

What was surprising -- though to some who had dealt with Chalabi, not all that surprising -- was that the anecdote was quoted to Quinn by Chalabi himself, who "[told] it with relish," as Quinn put it. A semi-retired CIA source who had dealt with Chalabi off and on into the late 1990s marveled to me about Chalabi's moxie; while Chalabi's courting of hubris was nothing new, the CIA man said, bragging about himself to the Post this way was really asking for it.

"I doubt he'll be telling it with relish a year from now, when he's either bleeding in a Baghdad gutter or on trial in an Iraqi court," the source said. "The guy's no democrat. He'd always tell us, 'Just put me in charge, I'll be America's friend, everything will be fine.' He's taken so much for granted in terms of his own importance, for Iraq and to Washington. I don't know if he's just working a con or actually believes his own line, but he'll end up taking himself out."

The prophecy seems ever closer to realization. Though down but not yet out, Chalabi's race to the bottom has been rapidly accelerating this month, courtesy both the First and Fourth estates. In April, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer moderated Iraq's "de-Baathification" program over an angry Chalabi's objections. On May 4, the Financial Times' John Dizard loosed an avalanche of insightful and uncomplimentary reporting on Chalabi on Salon, ably demonstrating why even some of Chalabi's longtime neoconservative boosters have come to hate their erstwhile ally.

In the May 10 edition of Newsweek, Mark Hosenball reported that administration concerns about Chalabi's ties to Iran had eroded the ground beneath his feet. "If Chalabi's support in the administration was once an iceberg," Hosenball reported, "says one Bush aide, 'It's now an ice cube.'"

Despite a vitriolic media campaign mounted by Chalabi against United Nations Iraq envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, U.S. government support has swung increasingly to the Algerian diplomat. Earlier this week, Wolfowitz announced that the Pentagon was phasing out the $340,000 monthly stipend Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) has seen as sacrosanct. And on Thursday, Andrew Cockburn, a venerable investigative chronicler of Iraq, posted on CounterPunch's Web site a penetrating analysis of the "Ian Paisley of the Iraqi Shia, fomenting sectarian assertiveness and brokering deals."

Now, in perhaps the greatest ignominy yet, Chalabi's house and INC offices were raided by U.S. and Iraqi authorities Thursday morning. Though American military police were along for security, the principals of the U.S. contingent were FBI agents and CIA officers pursuing their investigations into how Chalabi allegedly came to possess some highly classified U.S. information that U.S. electronic intercepts indicate ended up in Iranian hands.

But as Friday morning's New York Times and Washington Post report, the American and Iraqi police who swept into China House (Chalabi's digs in Baghdad's upscale Mansour neighborhood) are also pursuing joint investigations into "kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and theft of government property," as the Times put it, by more than a dozen of Chalabi's underlings. Perhaps the most interesting strand of the investigation involves one Sabbah Nouri, an INC official whom Chalabi had installed in the Ministry of Finance earlier this year -- and who is virtually the star of a front-page story in today's generally Chalabi-friendly New York Sun.

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