The Week

National Review, May 19, 2003

-- We think it's safe to assume that a regime with figures called "Chemical Ali" and "Dr. Germ" had WMD.

-- George Galloway, a showy Scottish Labour MP, has been a scourge of Anglo-American Iraq policy, denouncing Tony Blair and George W. Bush as "wolves." Now he stands revealed as a leech. Iraqi files discovered by reporters from the Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor show that the fallen regime forked over big bucks to keep its advocate in clover. One document, signed by Saddam's son Qusay, authorizes "a gratuity" of $3 million for Galloway's "courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq" ("Do this fast and inform me," wrote Qusay in his own hand). Another memo, from the secret service to Saddam himself, said Galloway was getting cuts from contracts under the oil- for-food program. Galloway plans to sue for libel, accuses the papers of dealing in disinformation, and says he has "never met, to the best of my knowledge, any member of Iraqi intelligence." Shades of Alger Hiss (who never knew "a man by the name of Whittaker Chambers")?

-- Who else in the antiwar movement got paid off? Who should feel miffed at having done Saddam's work for free? Two points, which pull in opposite directions, need to be kept simultaneously in mind. The feckless and the morally challenged in many cases do not require bribery to do their work. Sincere hatred of one's own country, and a displaced admiration for totalitarian methods, might of themselves make one admire tyrants, while vanity and the desire to cut a figure in the world can encourage one to advise them. But intelligence services have always used such tangibles as money and sex to grease their work. Often men turn their coats for an array of reasons, both high- and low- minded. We should do the antiwar movement the courtesy of assuming that they were honestly immoral, while recognizing that some of them are human enough to have taken gratuities.

-- Files from Iraqi ministries reveal a picture of intrigue and treachery in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein's run-up to disaster. So- called "friends of Iraq" in the French foreign ministry, it turns out, were relaying to their Iraqi counterparts the contents of private meetings with Americans, and passing on diplomatic traffic. Not to be outdone, one Johannes Hoffner, a German intelligence agent in Iraq under diplomatic cover, was wheedling Gen. Taher Jalil Haboosh, director of Iraqi intelligence: "My organization wants to develop its relationship with your organization." If Hoffner could help prevent an American invasion, Haboosh promised, Germany could expect lucrative contracts. The Russian Federal Security Bureau, successor to the KGB, was also briefing Saddam with information drawn from Russian agents and diplomats about how best to frustrate Washington and weapons inspection. Ol' Saddam needed friends like that. We don't.

-- Newt Gingrich gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute urging the Bush administration "to take on transforming the State Department as its next urgent mission." In the run-up to the Iraq war, he said, the department had failed to make the case for the president's policies; in the war's aftermath, it is failing to work for democracy. Efforts to transform the military and revamp homeland security are already underway -- so why not reform State, too? For these remarks, Gingrich was accused of launching a vicious personal attack on Colin Powell, probably at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld. Never mind that Gingrich never mentioned Powell's name and that nobody provided any evidence for Rumsfeld's involvement in the speech. Never mind, also, that Gingrich's indictment of the culture of the State Department is, in the main, amply justified. Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, responded to the critique by saying that Gingrich was "off his meds and out of therapy." Well, at least we have established that there are occasions when the State Department is prepared to get tough.

-- It is often possible to judge a man by the quality of his enemies. By this standard, Ahmad Chalabi is a very fine man. As leader of the Iraqi National Congress -- formerly an "opposition" group, but now one of several political organizations vying for prominence in the new Iraq -- he waged a long and lonely struggle to replace Saddam Hussein with a democratic government. This earned him the enmity of the State Department and the CIA, which would have preferred to have a rival thug dispatch Hussein in a coup. For this offense, he's also in the crosshairs of State's reliable water-carrier in the Senate, Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.), as well as the doyenne of conventional liberalism, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She recently called Chalabi a "Richard Perle pal," which she apparently considers an insult. Then she described him as a "convicted embezzler who is back in Iraq trying to ingratiate himself with the country he left 40 years ago." Chalabi was convicted in a secret Jordanian court -- have American liberals modified their views on due process? And while it's true that Chalabi's family fled the country in 1958, he has returned many times to northern Iraq to organize resistance against the Ba'ath regime. He did this at great personal risk, because so many of his other enemies over the years have lived in Baghdad.