May 25, 2004
FALLING OUT OF LOVE WITH A DREAMER:
A Dangerous Dreamer: Spurned by the U.S., Chalabi emerges as a Shiite firebrand (Andrew Cockburn, May 21, 2004, LA Times)
U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has made it known that Chalabi, who currently sits on the Iraqi Governing Council, will not figure in the Iraqi administration he is assembling for a June 30 transfer of power. And just this week the Pentagon revealed that it is at last suspending Chalabi's $340,000 monthly subsidy.That's not all. The discrediting of Chalabi's prewar "intelligence" on Saddam Hussein's WMD and terror links has wrecked his once-warm relations with the U.S. media. And his senior aides are under investigation for robbery and kidnapping, the official reason for Thursday's raid. The raid was not insignificant; it was an indication of just how seriously the U.S. occupation authorities consider Chalabi a threat to their plans for the future of Iraq.
In recent months he has been adopting an increasingly strident tone in denouncing both the U.S. occupation and the U.N. role in Iraq. He has recently compared American officials bringing former Iraqi generals to Fallouja to "putting the Nazis back in power" and has derided Brahimi as "an Algerian with an Arab nationalist agenda."
Less publicly, he has been putting together a sectarian Shiite bloc with the aim of immediately destabilizing whatever arrangement Brahimi unveils in 10 days' time. Many fear Chalabi could, for example, champion a move for a separate Shiite state, or indeed, foment anti-Sunni demonstrations. This is indeed a far cry from the days when Chalabi posed as the champion of liberal Iraqi democracy for U.S. supporters, though Iraqis who know him are less surprised at the cynical turnabout.
As one Iraqi who has known and worked with Chalabi in the past observes: "His dream has always been to be a sectarian Shia leader. Not in the religious sense, but as a political leader." Leading fellow sectarians in opposition to the U.S. and U.N. plans would be a vital step in realizing this dangerous dream.
Let's hope there's more to this story than just that, because Mr. Chalabi is right in what he says here. Brahimi and the rest of the Sunni Middle East are trying to restore control over the Shi'a of Iraq and it can not be tolerated. His "dangerous dream" is Iraq's most likely and probably healthiest future, though he seems unlikely to be the one to lead them there. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2004 3:23 PM
But how can this be? Brahimi is Mr. Poker Player's number one man. Who are you going to go with, Orrin, Ahmed Chalabi or George W. ("piss on Chalabi") Bush?
Posted by: Derek Copold at May 25, 2004 3:56 PMWhoever the Shi'ites choose. That's the opportunity Mr. Bush has afforded them. It was never going to be Chalabi.
http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/004725.html
Posted by: oj at May 25, 2004 4:02 PMChoose?
If you'd had your way, and we were out by April, the Shia would have 'chosen' Muqtadar, who overawed the rest.
After that, no doubt, there'd have been other would-be trillionaires trying to subvert him.
It is pretty clear that there is no widely regarded Shia leader; and certain that there is not one who is widely regarded and also vigorous and ruthless enough to maneuver through and around the would-be despots.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 25, 2004 4:56 PMMuqtadar is a punk, he'd have been tossed over quickly. If we'd left by last Fall no one would ever even have heard of him.
Posted by: oj at May 25, 2004 5:12 PMWell, Harry, it doesn't really make much difference which holy man they pick. They're difference in degree, not kind. The guy who was turned into cold cuts last week by a car bomb wasn't much better than Sadr. The same really goes for SCIRI and even Sistani.
Posted by: Derek Copold at May 25, 2004 5:52 PMWell, we will soon get to see if the Shiites would pick Muqtadar (like Harry says, but highly unlikely), beat him to a bloody pulp like a thug (lije oj wants, if not believe), or simply let him be, like we let Ted Kennedy run amock against our national interests except with some accountability (his life) for his actions.
But I smell "strawmen" in all these debates about the virtuousness or viciousness of leader A vs B. The same is true about the debate of democracy vs freedom. The standard of success should not/need not be to produce a process where a majority will always manage to pick Abraham Lincoln or the Dali Lama, and do it so that Jimmy Carter would approve. The standard should be to afford the ruled enough freedom such that the decision whether to routinely choose to antagonize the world's only superpower, at the risk of anhilation, is in the hands of many, and not just one. To use the often used: turning Iraq into an ownership society, where they own control over whether they live in peace with us and even thrive, or they face the consequences. (This is not just playing the old democracies don't go to war with each other, is just playing the odds like in portfolio management. Yet, I suspect many here think possible that an entire people will fail this test just as a single psycopath would.)
Posted by: MG at May 25, 2004 6:46 PMDid you know that Chalibi has a Ph.D. in Mathematics . Of course, so does the Unabomber. Chalabi got his from the University of Chicago. I am an alumni of the University of Chicago (B.A. '70), but then again so were Leopold and Loeb.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 25, 2004 11:46 PMI put 'chosen' in quotations concerning Muqtadr because he would not have come to power via election but by coup.
If we had not stood up to him these last weeks, who would have?
Orrin's probably right, he's probably a punk. He'd have been replaced by a bigger, tougher punk.
I can say however that they were boring and restrictive and that the boredom probably did not help my chances of sticking to the diet. I am not without some will power but as they say “Variety is the spice of life”.
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