JAMES O. GOLDSBOROUGH
The man who sold America a war

The San Diego Union-Tribune

June 7, 2004

'With friends like these," goes the saying, "who needs enemies?"

It is a question George Tenet, the departing CIA chief, is surely asking about Ahmad Chalabi, the former ruler-to-be of Iraq. Count these two as two more civilian victims of George W. Bush's war.

For years, Chalabi worked the people who now run the Bush administration. For years, he worked Congress. For years, he worked the media, starting with The New York Times, which has just begun to unravel the web he spun through that newspaper.

Chalabi received some $40 million appropriated by Congress over the past four years alone. He was paid by our government to lobby our government – as sweet as it gets.

His message was single-minded: Saddam Hussein is Moby Dick, the killer whale; America is Ahab, the redeemer. Americans would be greeted by joyful Iraqis as liberators, was his message, "with flowers and sweets."

Until Bush took office, Congress' investment in Chalabi did not pay off. His main supporters were outside government in a group called Project for the New American Century, which included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, all of whom would work in the Bush Pentagon.

In 1998, when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, the PNAC wrote President Clinton. The letter urged him to "act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies" by "removing Saddam's regime from power."

Like the Bush I administration, which in 1991 rejected the occupation of Iraq, Clinton believed occupation was not something the United States should undertake without international support, and none existed.

On Sept. 20, 2001, PNAC saw its chance. Invoking Sept. 11, it wrote Bush that, "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

It was addressing its own members, now part of Bush's government.

When Chalabi's funds were cut off last month following a U.S. raid on his Baghdad offices, he was receiving $335,000 in monthly payments from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The charge against Chalabi is that he passed intelligence to Iran, a country with which he, as a Shiite Muslim, has close ties. The FBI wants to know whether his civilian PNAC friends at the Pentagon passed him information that he passed on to Tehran.

Another question, more serious but so far unofficial, is this: If Chalabi helped Iran, did Iran help Chalabi? Did Tehran use Chalabi to manipulate Bush into war by passing bogus information on Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction?

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department counterterrorism officer, says, "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the U.S. for several years through Chalabi. They persuaded the U.S. and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."

Chalabi accuses the CIA and Tenet of a smear campaign against him. I think the truth is this: Tenet caved to White House and Pentagon pressure for war. He failed to relay his agency's skepticism about Chalabi. He told Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam possessed illegal weapons. He relied on information provided by Chalabi – perhaps via Iranian intelligence. Tenet turned against Chalabi only when he realized he had been duped.

We are in deep murk here, natural in a situation like this. This is no classical war, one, as Thucydides said of the Peloponnesian War, "caused by the rise of Athens and the danger it posed to Sparta."

Iraq was not rising, it was declining. It did not pose an imminent danger to America, not even a distant one.

This war was caused by people, not national interests, and the key person was Chalabi. Whatever the truth of the charges against him, this much can be said: It's possible there would have been no Iraq war without Chalabi.

He took people in, media included.

In two recent articles, The New York Times gave its mea culpa to readers for relying too much on Chalabi, who, it said in an editor's note, "became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration."

Daniel Okrent, the ombudsman, spelled out what the editor's note did not: Chalabi also became a favorite of The New York Times and was used by its reporters as an anonymous source (with help from Iranian intelligence?) for stories about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction.

An anonymous source, said Okrent, "who turns out to have lied . . . can be fairly exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper's readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others. (See Chalabi, Ahmad, et al.)" Unlike the editor's note, Okrent names the reporter, Judith Miller, who was closest to Chalabi, and also informs readers that the Times hired Chalabi's niece in its Kuwait bureau in 2003.

We should not rush to judge Chalabi. If a pigeon buys the Brooklyn Bridge from a sidewalk shyster, who's at fault? Bush's crowd had been looking to buy the bridge for years. Chalabi made the sale.

If they want to get even for a rotten deal, who can blame them?

Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com.