Since Time Magazine has sold out to popular misconception and turned their Man of the Year selection into an honour instead of the simple naming of the individual who most greatly changed the world, I'll pick up the slack.
The man who most greatly caused change in the world this past year, without a doubt in my mind, would be Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi. It was the reports from his Congress of Iraqi exiles that made many in the United States government and media believe Iraq still maintained chemical and biological weapons, the capacity to build more of these weapons, and an active nuclear weapons program. It was Chalabi's charisma, coupled with the hopes and preconceptions of Bush Administration hawks who had been publicly advocating an attack on Iraq since the mid-1990s, that made these reports the Administration's primary intelligence source on Iraq.
As the intelligence on Iraq split into two distinctly different stories -- with Chalabi's exiles claiming active weapons programs, and all other intelligence sources claiming few signs of such -- the divergence became so great that the Bush Administration stopped trusting its traditional intelligence agencies. Reports from such agencies as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research were put on the back burner as the Administration formed new own agencies to process the types of reports it wanted to hear. Chief among the new agencies is the Office of Special Plans, founded by Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, overseen by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and run by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti and Rand Corporation analyst Abram Shulsky. According to New Yorker reporter Sy Hersh, who has done the most extensive reporting on the intelligence situation, the Office soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency...as President Bush's main source of intelligence regarding Iraq's possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda". Meanwhile, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton stopped listening to his intelligence briefs, even barring his Bureau of Intelligence and Research liaison from his morning meetings, and ordered intelligence reports favourable to the pro-war arguments delivered straight to him prior to any fact-checking intelligence analysis. The C.I.A., facing the most intense political pressure it had ever been under, loosened its standards and began making reports favourable to the Administration's desires.
In the top minds of the Administration, Iraq became "a direct and imminent threat to the United States" which "threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder" and could "decide, on any given day, to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group". Iraq "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons", so "facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Iraq was seen as so important that, according to Hersh, "The Bush Administration took many intelligence operations that had been aimed at Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world and redirected them to the Persian Gulf".
Then, suddenly, the war was over and there was nothing. Whereas Hans Blix's team had actually found a few mustard gas shells, U.S. forces with free range to the country were even less successful until the time of this writing when allied forces finally found some dilapidated blister gas shells that had apparently been buried around or before the 1991 war. To everyone's surprise, Iraq's scientists gave the same answers on their own free will that they did when they and their families were threatened by Saddam's agents. Mahdi Obeidi, a scientist in Iraq's nuclear weapons program of the 1980s, had buried parts of a centrifuge in his garden during the 1991 war, but the U.S. wasn't interested and ignored him for months. The much-hyped aluminium tubes turned out to have been used for conventional rocket production, just like Iraq and the scientific community had said. A few trucks of indeterminate use were discovered, and Bush rushed to announce "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" before British inspectors found them to produce harmless hydrogen gas for balloons used to direct artillery fire.
Meanwhile, Iraq was not pacified as quickly as had been predicted. As the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss reported, "the same unit that fed Chalabi's intelligence on W.M.D. to Rumsfeld was also feeding him Chalabi's stuff on the prospects for postwar Iraq", to the detriment of State Department analyst Tom Warrick's Future of Iraq Project whose cynical projections led to a small-scale media smear campaign against him. When General Jay Garner requested Warrick for his reconstruction team, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld refused, saying the order to bar Warrick from Iraq "came to me from such a high level that I can't overturn it". As the paramilitary and terrorist violence erupted, Vice President Dick Cheney turned against Secretary of State Colin Powell and said "If you hadn't opposed the I.N.C. and Chalabi, we wouldn't be in this mess."
Ahmed Chalabi was born into a powerful family in King Faisal's Iraq. His father served as President of the Senate, a member of Faisal's Cabinet, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of one of Iraq's largest corporations until the Army deposed King Faisal in 1958, forcing his family to flee the country. Chalabi eventually alit in the United States, earning a master's degree in mathematics and teaching the subject at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
Chalabi became one of the co-founders of Jordan's Petra Bank in 1977 and became Petra's Chairman in 1982, earning wealth and a reputation as a successful businessman. This reputation evaporated in 1989 when Petra collapsed amid scandals of embezzlement and overstating assets. Chalabi was fired and ordered arrested by Jordan's King Hussein himself, but managed to escape the country.
In a state-run tribunal, Chalabi was convicted in absentia of embezzling nearly $70 million from the bank and sentenced to 22 years of prison. Interpol rejected Jordan's request for Chalabi's extradition because he was not afforded a fair, civilian trial. From overseas, Chalabi claimed that the money had been taken from the bank with King Hussein's knowledge to fund Iraqi opposition groups and the United States' secret arms trade with Iran, and accused King Hussein of acting against him under orders from Saddam Hussein.
Throughout the 1980s, Chalabi had been lobbying people in the U.S. Congress and State Department to oppose Saddam, who had seized power in his home country in 1979. However, he met with little success in these early endeavours. After meeting with other Iraqi exiles in a 1992 gathering in Vienna, Chalabi refocused his life towards one goal above all else -- getting Saddam out of Iraq. Chalabi formed a government in exile, the Iraqi National Congress, to effect this goal.
After Saddam crushed the revolts following his 1991 military defeat, Chalabi quickly gained the trust and support of many in the American military and intelligence establishment, including Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey. The formation of the Iraqi National Congress legitimized Chalabi as a true leader of Iraqi exiles, rather than one of the many individual issue advocates in D.C. As his influence grew, however, so also grew an opposition to Chalabi within the U.S. intelligence establishment.
In 1995, Chalabi and the Central Intelligence Agency put into motion a plan to overthrow Saddam. Forces from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and the C.I.A.'s Iraqi National Accord were inserted into Kurdish-controlled territory in Iraq to solicit defections from the Iraqi army. However, the two groups attacked each other instead of Saddam, the Kurds allied themselves with Saddam against both, and the United States never provided the promised support. The effort ended as a dismal failure on the level of the Bay of Pigs, and evaporated much of Chalabi's support.
The coming of the Bush Administration brought many of Chalabi's supporters to the highest ranks of the U.S. government, restoring his influence. With the help of the United States, the Iraqi National Congress formed a paramilitary force, the Free Iraqi Forces. During the invasion of Iraq, the Free Iraqi Forces were airdropped into the country and began attacking signs of Saddam's rule -- tearing Saddam's posters and assisting in the toppling of his statue in Fardus Square -- showing a frozen, fearful population that Saddam's iron grip upon them was at an end and sparking a furnace of popular resentment for the crimes Saddam had committed against the Iraqi people. When Saddam's government fell and the United States formed an interim Iraqi government, Chalabi was granted a position on the Iraqi Governing Council, and many Iraqi National Congress members became mid-level officials in the new Coalition Provisional Government.
The intertwining tales of Iraq and Ahmed Chalabi are still being written as you read this. For additional background information, I have compiled a list of articles worth reading, many of which were used as sources for this report.
Posted by Warrior Tang at January 17, 2004 10:36 AM
Add my vote for Chalabi, who must have seemed like a messiah to Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, etc. And from what (little) I've heard, he's about the only one they haven't blamed yet for their misconceptions.
Posted by: andante at January 19, 2004 09:42 AMAdd my vote for Chalabi, who must have seemed like a messiah to Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, etc. And from what (little) I've heard, he's about the only one they haven't blamed yet for their misconceptions.
Posted by: andante at January 19, 2004 09:42 AM