What's Right

National Review, March 10, 2003 by David Frum

Our Man for Iraq

There's an old joke about the Air Force major assigned to brief a superior officer about the latest Cold War contingency plan. He finishes triumphantly: "And that is how we intend to destroy the enemy!"

The superior shakes his head wearily. "Young man, the Soviets are our adversary. The Navy is the enemy."

If you've done much newspaper reading in recent weeks, you have probably noticed all those stories -- some datelined Washington, some datelined northern Iraq -- about the latest flare-up between the U.S. government and the main Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress. It's enough to make you wonder whether some people in the U.S. government don't see Saddam as merely the adversary -- and the INC as the real enemy.

The INC is an assembly of many different groups united by their determination to overthrow Saddam and build a more liberal Iraq. It is made up of Kurds as well as Arabs, socialists and free-marketeers, Christians and Muslims, Sunnis and Shi'ites, secular intellectuals and tribal traditionalists. The INC is led by Ahmed Chalabi, a descendant of one of Iraq's most prominent families; an American-educated businessman who is as democratic, market-oriented, and pro-Western as any leader the Arab world has produced in half a century. Even Chalabi's many Iraqi critics acknowledge his moderation and tolerance. "I know this about Ahmed," one of them once said to me: "If I disagree with him, he won't murder me. By Iraqi standards, that's very impressive."

Over the years, Chalabi's democratic vision for Iraq has won the support of Americans across the political spectrum. He's admired by Iraq hawks like Richard Perle, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain -- and also by Iraq doves like Joe Biden. He has been joined by Iraq's most famous writer, the democratic exile Kanan Makiya. In 1998, Congress appropriated nearly $100 million in aid for the INC.

Most of that money, however, has never been paid. For if Congress supports the INC, large elements of the U.S. foreign-policy bureaucracy hate it with a hatred hotter than any emotion they evince toward Saddam Hussein.

In the 1990s, the INC's CIA handlers forbade the group to conduct operations on Iraqi soil. Since 9/11, the State Department has shunned the INC in favor of its own creation, the Iraqi National Accord, a collection of former generals and other associates of Saddam.

A poisonous stream of not-for-attribution quotes about the INC has flowed from State and CIA into any newspaper willing to print them. Chalabi, it's said, is corrupt, ineffective, and an Iranian spy. "He could fight you for the last petit four on the tray over tea at the Savoy," one bitter former official told The New Yorker last April, "but that's about it."

Who's right? What's going on?

As always in Washington, there is a back-story -- and then a story back of the back-story.

The back-story is this: In the 1990s, the Clinton administration organized a series of covert operations against Saddam's government. They all failed dismally, and many of the Iraqis who took part in them died gruesome deaths. The organizers of these operations felt shame, guilt -- and a desperate desire to fix the blame for repeated disaster on somebody else.

The INC was an especially attractive target for the blame-shifters because Chalabi had repeatedly warned that the covert operations would fail -- and in Washington, there are few sins quite so unforgivable as being right when everyone else is wrong. Actually, there is one worse sin: advocating bold action when everyone around you has shamefacedly decided that they would prefer to do nothing.

Chalabi kept arguing that the way to defeat Saddam was not with a plot, but with INC ground forces backed by U.S. airpower: the same tactic that would triumph in Afghanistan in 2001. The Clinton NSC team loathed this idea, and they fiercely resented Chalabi for pushing it.

The grudge endured into the Bush administration because, for reasons that remain very hard to understand, the Bush team kept much of the old Clinton national-security apparatus on the job for many months -- in some cases more than a year -- after Inauguration Day. And nowhere did change come more slowly than in those parts of the NSC that deal with the Middle East. Long after Clinton had left Washington to give speeches about how he came this close to making up his mind to wage war against Saddam Hussein, the people he hired were still at their desks waging war against Ahmed Chalabi.

That's the back-story. Now the back-back-story. Since the population of Iraq is nearly two-thirds Shi'ite Muslim, a more representative political system will probably bring to power a government drawn from the Shi'ite majority. Chalabi himself comes from a prominent Shi'ite family. And this prospect is very frightening to the Sunni Arabs of the Persian Gulf -- and their many and influential friends and protectors in the West.

Even without the religious element, the idea of representative government being established anywhere in the Arab world dismays and appalls other Arab governments. That's understandable enough: The Arab world is a fractious and fragile place, super-saturated in extremism -- it's easy to conjure up nightmare scenarios about what could happen if the people of the Arab world were ever allowed to express themselves freely.