Iraq Without Saddam: Iraq War Hawks Have Plans to Reshape Entire Mideast
[Excerpts throughout]
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September 1, 2002
Iraq Without Saddam
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
As I think about President Bush's plans to take out Saddam Hussein and rebuild Iraq into a democracy, one question gnaws at me: Is Iraq the way it is today because Saddam Hussein is the way he is? Or is Saddam Hussein the way he is because Iraq is the way it is?
I mean, is Iraq a totalitarian dictatorship under a cruel, iron-fisted man because the country is actually an Arab Yugoslavia — a highly tribalized, artificial state, drawn up by the British, consisting of Shiites in the south, Kurds in the north and Sunnis in the center — whose historical ethnic rivalries can be managed only by a Saddam-like figure?
Or, has Iraq, by now, congealed into a real nation? And once the cruel fist of Saddam is replaced by a more enlightened leadership, Iraq's talented, educated people will slowly produce a federal democracy.
The answer is critical, because any U.S. invasion of Iraq will leave the U.S. responsible for nation-building there. Invade Iraq and we own Iraq. And once we own it, we will have to rebuild it, and since that is a huge task, we need to understand what kind of raw material we'll be working with.
It is instructive in this regard to quickly review Iraq's history before Saddam. Romper Room it was not. It was a saga of intrigue, murder and endless coups involving the different ethnic and political factions that were thrown together inside Iraq's borders by the British. In July 1958, Iraq's King Faisal was gunned down in his courtyard by military plotters led by Brig. Abdel Karim Kassem and Col. Abdul Salam Arif. A few months later, Kassem ousted Arif for being too pro-Nasserite. Around the same time a young Saddam tried, but failed, to kill Kassem, who himself executed a slew of Iraqi Nasserites in Mosul in 1959.
In 1963, Arif came back from exile and killed Kassem. A short time later Arif, and the Baath Party thugs around him, savagely slaughtered and tortured thousands of left-wingers and Communists all across Iraq. Arif ruled until 1966, when he was killed in a helicopter crash and was succeeded by his brother, who was toppled in 1968 by Saddam and his clan from the village of Tikrit. That's when Saddam first began sending away his opponents to a prison called Qasr al-Nahiya — "the Palace of the End." Since 1958, every one of these Sunni-dominated military regimes in Baghdad began with a honeymoon with the Kurds in northern Iraq and ended up fighting them.
The point here is that we are talking about nation-building from scratch. Iraq has a lot of natural resources and a decently educated population, but it has none of the civil society or rule of law roots that enabled us to quickly build democracies out of the ruins of Germany and Japan after World War II. Iraq's last leader committed to the rule of law may have been Hammurabi — the King of Babylon in the 18th century B.C. So once Saddam is gone, there will be a power vacuum, revenge killings and ethnic pulling and tugging between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.
This is not a reason for not taking Saddam out. It is a reason for preparing the U.S. public for a potentially long, costly nation-building operation and for enlisting as many allies as possible to share the burden. There is no avoiding nation-building in Iraq. Because to get at Iraq's weapons of mass destruction we'll need to break the regime open, like a walnut, and then rebuild it.
What's worrying about the Bushies is that they seem much more adept at breaking things than building things. To do nation-building you need to be something of a naïve optimist. I worry that the Bushies are way too cynical for nation-building.
My most knowledgeable Iraqi friend tells me he is confident that the morning after any U.S. invasion, American troops would be welcomed by Iraqis, and the regime would fold quickly. It's the morning after the morning after that we have to be prepared for.
In the best case, a "nice" strongman will emerge from the Iraqi Army to preside over a gradual transition to democracy, with America receding into a supporting role. In the worst case, we crack Iraq open and it falls apart in our hands, with all its historical internal tensions — particularly between its long-ruling Sunni minority and its long-frustrated Shiite majority. In that case, George Bush will have to become Iraq's strongman — the iron fist that holds the country together, gradually redistributes the oil wealth and supervises a much longer transition to democracy.
My Iraqi friend tells me that anyone who tells you he knows which scenario will unfold doesn't know Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/opinion/01FRIE.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=print&position=top
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Old Money Wants Iraq Back
Paul Vitello
October 10, 2002
The limousine was so long it looked like a small, mobile country of tinted glass. It was escorted by four Nassau County police cars. When Ahmed Chalebi stepped from it at the Mineola courthouse to speak to the media yesterday, correction officers stood guard. They wore bullet-proof vests.
Chalebi wore a nice suit. He is an Iraqi-born, Western-educated investment banker and head of an organization calling itself the Iraqi National Congress. The members of this group are all exiles, and all opponents of Saddam Hussein. They want him out. They want parliamentary democracy in.
He does not want to be the president of a provisional government that would take control after Saddam's ouster by U.S. military forces, he said. He just wants to see freedom restored to the people of a great country, he said.
But most Americans don't know much about Iraq. And after days of speeches on the floor of the House and Senate - speeches of unspeakable unoriginality, speeches so predictable they sound in aggregate like a 10-mile-long freight train clacking over a railway crossing in the middle of nowhere - it feels like we know even less.
This much we know: Iraq is run by the military strongman, Hussein. It is a nation sitting on the second-largest oil reservoir in the world, and has a population equivalent to that of New Jersey. President George W. Bush wants to invade it because he says Saddam has weapons of mass destruction that he might use himself or slip into the hands of terrorists.
That its capital, Baghdad, was one of the first great cities of civilization, one might happen to know from high school world history class. You would not know it from watching Fox News.
If nothing else, Chalebi added a little something to our meager information.
He said the fertile valleys of the Euphrates River were the site of some of the first agricultural settlements in human history. Mathematics, law and engineering were disciplines in which the people of what is now Iraq established the first principles, he said. Irrigation systems and desalination of salt water were among their greatest contributions to early science. They were a full-fledged culture when the Greeks were still mainly shepherds.
In the aftermath of World War I (we're skipping 5,000 years here), the country now known as Iraq was carved out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire. A parliamentary monarchy was established. (Chalebi's family was close to this monarchy.)
In the 1930s, he said, the ideological warfare in Europe between facism and communism was reflected in internal conflicts inside Iraq. During this period, the Ba'ath Party, which Saddam Hussein now heads, was born from nationalist and facist roots.
After World War II, he said, the parliamentary system in Iraq was further undermined by the U.S. policy of "containment" toward the Soviet Union. Under this policy, the U.S. government was skeptical about democratic governments in strategic states such as Iraq around the perimeter of the Soviet Union, fearing they would become communist by popular election, and fall under the Soviet's sphere of control. Instead, this policy favored military governments.
"It was a most unfortunate historical development for us," Chalebi said. "The U.S. believed that the only institution capable of holding the line against communism was the military."
In the late 1950s, the monarchy was overthrown by the Ba'ath Party, which in turn was taken over by the military. Saddam took over in 1979, "and since then Iraq has been in a continual state of war," Chalebi said. "First with Iran. Then a civil war against the Kurds, then the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Gulf War in 1991."
Chalebi believes the U.S. has a certain "moral responsibility" to the people of Iraq - for having failed to remove Saddam in 1991, but even more for its long-standing policy of support for military-style, repression-drenched governments throughout the Middle East. If not for U.S. backing, there would be no Saddam, he said.
Saddam is virtually a creation of the United States, he said; and now it is time for the U.S. to kill its Frankenstein.
http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-livit102959934oct10.story
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How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
by Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot
The US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0908-08.htm
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Nov2002/Scahill1102.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0802-01.htm
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U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationships with Iraq, 1980 - August 2, 1990: A comprehensive chronology covering the least discussed phase of US/Iraq relations. [Point by point documentation of how the Bush and Reagan administrations facilitated, then winked at Iraqi development and use of chemical weapons]
http://www.cam.ac.uk/societies/casi/info/usdocs/usiraq80s90s.html
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/pages/voices_library.html
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Published on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 in the Boston Globe
Iraq War Hawks Have Plans to Reshape Entire Mideast
by John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid
WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration debates going to war against Iraq, its most hawkish members are pushing a sweeping vision for the Middle East that sees the overthrow of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq as merely a first step in the region's transformation.
''There are some people who religiously believe that Iraq is the beginning of this great new adventure of remapping the Middle East and all these countries. I think that's a simplistic view,'' said Judith Yaphe, an Iraq scholar and senior research professor at the National Defense University.
Jessica T. Mathews, president of Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, a Washington policy group, said that installing a democracy in Iraq, much less the rest of the Middle East, would be extraordinarily difficult, if not out of the question. She contended that change in Iraq is more akin to building a wall brick by brick and will require the support of allies.
''The argument we would be starting a democratic wave in Iraq is pure blowing smoke,'' Mathews said. ''You have 22 Arab governments and not one has made any progress toward democracy, not one. It's one of the great issues before us, but the very last place you'd suspect to turn the tide is Iraq. You don't go from an'' authoritarian '' dictatorship to a democracy overnight, not even quickly.''
Nevertheless, there are signs the thinking has powerful backers.
While many of the hawks are under the wing of Wolfowitz, several conservatives hold influential positions in Cheney's office and in the State Department, which is headed by the administration's most prominent moderate, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. During the Clinton administration, many of them served with far-right, defense-oriented think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
Perle, an adviser to both groups, remains a resident fellow at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute and a member of the board at the Hudson Institute.
''There are people invested in this philosophy all throughout the administration. Some of the strongest voices are in State,'' said one senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0910-01.htm
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October 12, 2002
Many Ways the US Attack on Iraq May Fail
by George Hunsinger
Many supporters of the U.S. war against Iraq suppose that it will be won quickly and easily. Not all responsible analysts agree. Two doubters are particularly interesting, one opposed to attacking Iraq, the other supporting it.
Three scenarios are outlined by Immanuel Wallerstein, who teaches at Yale. First, there is the devout hope that the U.S. will win easily and swiftly, with minimal loss of life. Second, the U.S. could win but only after a long and exhausting war, with massive loss of life. Finally, the U.S. could actually lose the war, as in Vietnam, being forced to withdraw from Iraq after a massive loss of life.
Wallerstein comments: "Swift and easy victory, obviously the hope of the U.S. administration, is the least likely. I give it one chance in twenty. Winning after a long exhausting war is the most likely, perhaps two chances out of three. And losing, incredible as it seems (but then it seemed so in Vietnam too) is a plausible outcome, one chance in three."
The most probable outcome is a long drawn-out bloody war. Iraq would be devastated, Wallerstein observes, political and economic turmoil would result at home and abroad, and a "regime change" would indeed occur, but not in Baghdad.
The question of "the day after" must also be faced. James Webb, former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, has written: "The issue before us is not simply whether the United States would end the regime of Saddam Hussein, but whether we as a nation are prepared physically to occupy territory in the Middle East for the next 30 to 50 years." George Friedman, head of Stratfor, has said that invading Iraq would be something like a dog chasing a car. What do you do once you catch it? The title of a detailed and sobering article in the current Atlantic Monthly asks: "The Fifty-first State?"
The attack against Iraq cannot be reconciled with just war principles. Lacking a sufficient cause, it will be a crime of aggression. If it overrides the UN, it will lack legitimate authority. Through urban warfare it could well result in massive civilian casualties. It is not likely to be a last resort. Nor is it likely to have a reasonable chance of success. The huge risks - chaos in Iraq, chaos in the Middle East, and chaos around the world -- hardly seem worth the cost.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hunsinger1.html
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October 12, 2002
Radical Shias are a worry for Bush as well as Saddam
by Ian Cobain
Our correspondent reports from a city renowned for bloodshed and opposition to the Iraqi regime
Despite the years of oppression, the conscripts in Karbala had good reason to be edgy yesterday: the Shias represent a constant threat to Saddam’s survival. Moreover, as the White House contemplates a regime change, there is a growing realisation that the empowerment of the Shias could end in the break-up of Iraq and that the turmoil could spill far beyond its borders.
The spectre of another Shia rebellion will not only alarm Saddam, it must also disturb Washington, as it highlights the dangers behind talk of a regime change.
President Bush held out hope of democracy in Iraq in his speech to the United Nations last month, and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, says that he foresees the country being governed “in a democratic fashion”.
But a democratic Iraq would be a predominantly Shia Iraq and one which may choose to forge closer ties with its Persian co-religionists in Iran, the second nation in President Bush’s “axis of evil”. Some in the West fear even that a Shia Iraq may become an Islamic state.
Shia supremacy in Iraq could also stir the restless Shia majority in Bahrain, who have also been excluded from power. It could encourage the Kurds in the north, who are largely Sunni, to press for independence: a scenario that Turkey and Syria, with their own large Kurdish populations, are determined to avoid at any cost.
As the faithful clung to the al-Hussein shrine yesterday, worshipping their prophets with an emotional abandon that was in sharp contrast to the strict self-control of the Sunnis, rebellion must have been far from their minds. But as they stepped into the sunlight and eyed Saddam’s young soldiers, who knows what they were thinking?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-443664,00.html
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September 1, 2002
Dancing With Dictators
For a nation that honors democracy and freedom, the United States has a nasty habit of embracing foreign dictators when they seem to serve American interests. It is one of the least appealing traits of American foreign policy. Like his predecessors, President Bush is falling for the illusion that tyrants make great allies. If Mr. Bush is not careful, Washington will be mopping up for years from the inevitable foreign policy disasters that come of befriending autocrats who maintain a stranglehold on their own people.
When unsavory governments control strategic locations or resources, the impulse to join hands with them can be irresistible. In some cases, there may appear to be no practical alternative. It would have been much more difficult to dislodge the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan without the cooperation of Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Washington's longstanding ties to the Saudi royal family have ensured a steady flow of oil to the West for most of the last 60 years.
But there is a difference between making alliances of convenience and uncritically working with dictators. Washington should not repeat the mistake it has made so often in the past by muting its support for democracy and human rights in these societies. General Musharraf, the Saudis and other autocratic allies like President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt rule repressive societies that become a breeding ground for anti-American hostility. Terrorism will retreat where democracy advances, not where autocrats muzzle political expression or buy peace at home by financing violence abroad.
When Washington preaches democracy while tolerating the tyranny of allies, America looks double-faced. That's certainly the unflattering picture the world sees today. Mr. Bush has ordered the government to dry up the funding of Islamic terrorism, but Saudi Arabia is the principal financier of groups that promote such terrorism. The White House is pressing the Palestinians to establish democratic institutions while largely condoning the undemocratic actions of Mr. Mubarak. Vice President Dick Cheney's recent calls for bringing democracy to Iraq ring hollow as long as Washington is silent about General Musharraf's arbitrary rule in Pakistan.
A long, unhappy history illustrates the cost of cozying up to dictators. America still pays for its blind support of the Shah of Iran. The blank checks Washington wrote to Gen. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan in the 1980's helped nurture what later became Al Qaeda. Decades of misguided American support for Gen. Suharto in Indonesia and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, now Congo, left both countries a legacy of debt, violent ethnic conflict and weak institutions. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines was another painful embarrassment.
The Bush administration seems to have learned little from these costly mistakes. Meeting America's short-term military and diplomatic needs should not require abandoning its democratic principles.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/01/opinion/01SUN1.html?todaysheadlines
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Sunday Herald - 22 September 2002
Unveiled: the thugs Bush wants in place of Saddam
If Saddam Hussein is America's frying-pan, these men are the fire into which President Bush may be jumping. Foreign Editor David Pratt runs the rule over some of the highly assorted and far from loveable would-be beneficiaries of Iraqi 'regime change'
CORRUPT, feckless and downright dangerous. Some say they make the Butcher of Baghdad himself look good. Who are they? The contenders for Saddam Hussein's throne.
Ever since the September 11 attacks 'regime change' has been the catchphrase coming out of Washington. But if George Bush is as intent on invading Iraq as he seems to be, overthrowing the Iraqi regime and deposing Saddam may well turn out to be the easy bit.
If Afghanistan's nightmarish internal politics proved problematic after the toppling of the Taliban, Bush should be under no illusion that Iraq's would be any less so. The Northern Alliance might not have seemed a very palatable alternative to the Taliban, but it has a certain rough credibility. There is no equivalent in Iraq.
Following any ousting of Saddam, the task will be to prevent anarchy from returning to the streets of Baghdad and the oil facilities throughout the country. To that end the US needs its own strongman to put in Saddam's place.
Saddam, of course, has never had a problem with making enemies. Indeed, the breadth of the Iraqi opposition -- from Islamic fundamentalists and communists to monarchists and free-marketeers -- demonstrates his ability in this respect. Seemingly every week a new group springs up and issues an identikit statement to the international media. Recently one organisation, which nobody seems to have heard of except its own members, even took over the Iraqi embassy in Germany to prove that it existed.
There are, however, some basic patterns to the cacophony of proclamations from new movements, councils and parties that purport to represent the voice of the authentic Iraqi individual.
First, there are the national bodies that were created inside Iraq before 1990, when the bond that had formed between Iraq and the US was shattered by the invasion of Kuwait. These are groups like the Iraqi Communist Party, the largest group in Iraq from the 1950s through to the 1970s, and al-Daawa al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Call), which engineered the biggest demonstrations against the Iraqi regime in the 1970s and had close ties with Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolutionaries in neighbouring Iran.
With extensive experience of organisation and the political process inside Iraq, many of these groups retain some level of support -- or at least respect -- among many of the Iraqi people. They have three things in common: they are intensely persecuted by the Iraqi regime, they are wholly unpalatable to the West, and they strongly oppose a US invasion on the grounds of the suffering this will cause the Iraqi people.
Second, there are groups representing sectarian or ethnic interests such as the four million Iraqi Kurds, and the country's Shi'as, which make up 60% of the population.
Although some of these groups are large, and the US has sought their backing for its invasion plans, they remain split within their own ranks, and have no chance of being installed in Saddam's place as they cannot claim to represent all Iraqis.
Third, there are the new groups, often formed under US auspices after 1990. The US has tried to encourage senior members of Iraq's military and civilian establishments to defect to the West, and their prize has often been a budget, some training, lavish offices, frequent meetings with US officials and the prospect of taking a leading political role in a post-Saddam Iraq. It is from these groups that the US will select the new rulers if they succeed in ousting Saddam.
'He may be a son-of-a-bitch,' President Franklin D Roosevelt is said to have commented of the brutal Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, 'but he's our son-of-a-bitch'. Saddam was Washington's SOB throughout most of the Reagan administration, a valuable foil against the US's nemesis, Iran. Somewhere along the line, possibly in 1990, he lost the 'our'.
Judging from the current rogues' gallery of heirs to Saddam, it's anyone's guess which of them will be tagged with Washington's favourite SOB epithet this time around.
General Nizar Al-Khazraji
ACCORDING to many human rights groups, he is the field commander who led the 48-hour chemical weapons attack which poisoned and burned 5000 Kurdish civilians in the northern town of Halabja in March 1988. He also, alleges one credible eyewitness who testified in video-taped evidence earlier this year, kicked a little Kurdish child to death after his forces entered a village during the height of the Iraqi repression in 1988.
But, says Ambassador David Mack, a senior official in the US State Department who co-ordinates meetings of Iraqi opposition groups in Washington DC, General Nizar al-Khazraji has 'a good military reputation' and 'the right ingredients' as a future leader in Iraq.
The most senior military officer to defect since 1990, al-Khazraji was Saddam's chief of staff from 1980 until 1991, leading the army through the eight-year Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He left Iraq in 1996 and was granted political asylum first in Spain and then in Denmark, where he now lives in a quiet suburb of Copenhagen. There are claims he was reluctant to leave Iraq, but that the CIA tempted him with promises of a major political role after the overthrow of Saddam. As a result, he has not been quiet about his plans to lead Iraq: he once described his future leadership as a 'sacred duty'.
Apart from his apparent boastfulness, which has alienated many of his fellow travellers in the exiled opposition, al-Khazraji's role in some of the worst abuses of Saddam's regime poses serious problems in presenting himself as a future leader of Iraq.
A Danish newspaper investigating al-Khazraji's role found he was the field commander during the Halabja operation, choosing the chemicals to be used and the intensity with which to drop them. Although al-Khazraji denies having had this role, the allegations were serious and detailed enough for the Danish ministry of justice to launch an official investigation, with the potential to bring war crimes charges against him. Eighty-nine Kurdish and human rights groups have issued a joint statement to demand his trial. He has been under effective house arrest for almost a year now, guarded by four police officers. Despite this al-Khazraji, 64, says he has no doubt the Iraqi military is ready to rise up against Saddam. All it will take is a lot of American firepower, carefully targeted, and some organising by military exiles like himself. How can he be so sure? 'I was the chief of my army and I know my men very well,' he says.
Brigadier-General Najib Al-Salihi
IN meetings at the British Foreign Office in March this year, Brigadier-General Najib al-Salihi acquired the sobriquet of 'the rapidly rising star' of the Iraqi opposition. When a popular website of Iraqi exiles held an online poll to find who would be their preferred future leader, al-Salihi raced ahead -- until the poll had to be suspended amid suspicions it was being rigged. In any case, it wouldn't have been the first Iraqi election to produce a victor with 99.9% of the vote.
Commander of an armoured division of Iraq's elite Republican Guard in the Gulf war, Salihi played a significant military role in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. He was also engaged in putting down the uprising against Saddam 's rule that followed the defeat at the hands of the US-led forces. The repressive way in which this particular episode was handled caused 1.5 million people to flee their homes, while Salihi went on to write a book about his crushing of the popular uprising, entitled Al-Zilzal, 'The Earthquake'.
After commanding Iraqi forces in putting down another rebellion by an opposition group in 1995, Salihi defected to the side of his former enemies and came to co-operate with the US, where he now lives. He has the advantage of youth over many of his rivals, having just turned 50, and strikes a contradictory pose with regard to his future role. On the one hand he states that the military should not be engaged in the politics of Iraq. On the other, he heads the CIA- sponsored Iraqi Free Officers Movement, another collection of dubious military exiles in the Washington suburbs, which he claims can raise 30,000 fighters. He also says he favours a three- pronged infantry assault in Baghdad from Kurdish Iraq, Kuwait and possibly Jordan. He forecasts a scenario in which Saddam would be on the run, suggesting that US aircraft policing the no-fly zones could be used to back an advance on Baghdad by rebel forces from the north.
'Saddam will try to escape, but he will find that he has nowhere to go,' Salihi has said. 'We will not be able to put him on trial. The people will get to him first.' Cleverly, Salihi avoids giving the impression of power-hungriness and speaks of the 'tough work ahead' and the 'bond of trust with the Iraqi people'. The same Iraqi people he so mercilessly crushed when they opposed Saddam.
Ahmad Al-Chalabi
Ahmad al-Chalabi came to international attention not for his politics, but for fleeing to London from Jordan in 1989 amid allegations he had embezzled millions from the bank he used to own. Although he denies any wrongdoing, the collapse of the Petra Bank left thousands of its customers in penury and earned him comparisons with Robert Maxwell. He didn't return to Jordan to defend himself at his trial in 1992, which took place in his absence, and will begin his 32 years in prison only if he returns to Jordan, which he shows no sign of doing at present.
The long-time face of the Iraqi opposition in Washington, Chalabi took the reins of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an umbrella organisation created in 1992 with the assistance of the CIA. Although he was officially demoted in 1999 to be a member of the INC's executive council rather than its leader, he is widely accepted as the first among equals and is spoken of by INC officials as the future president of Iraq. This despite the fact that the US State Department recently found that about half of the $4m it had given to the INC was not properly accounted for. They clearly expected better from a former maths professor and banker, and cut off funding. Chalabi, however, galvanised his US supporters, and the Pentagon and the White House again started picking up the tab.
Chalabi is, if nothing else, an operator. One delegate at a New York meeting of the INC said of him: 'He takes more than his share, much more than his share, and I get nothing. Just look at the way he dresses. They say Saddam has 300 suits; well, this guy has 400.'
Many Chalabi mannerisms that appeal in the West may have been picked up at his Sussex private school, where he was a member of the cadet corps -- his sole training for planning an invasion of Iraq.
Just as the US was forgetting him in the wake of more accusations of financial irregularities, he came up with a plan to unseat Saddam in a choreographed 11-week manoeuvre. The plot, launched at Chalabi's Mayfair home and involving turning untrained volunteers into successful revolutionaries, provided him with the soundbite necessary to capture US policymakers' minds in the wake of September 11. Few stopped to question if it verged on the unrealistic.
Convicted embezzlers, accused war criminals and CIA stooges to a man, few if any of those who would dethrone Saddam match up to the proverbial man on a white horse, a respected military officer who can ride in, take control and unite Iraq's fractious tribes and religious groups. Serious questions remain as to the readiness, willingness and fitness to lead of those in main contention.
As Said K Aburish, the respected Middle Eastern writer and biographer of Saddam Hussein, concluded: 'I examined my notes of the interviews I conducted with 82 Iraqi opposition leaders, and began identifying those on my list whose thinking resembles Saddam's. To my horror, I decided 75 of the people I interviewed were men who would kill to achieve their goal.' One can only wonder whether Washington has come to the same conclusion, or indeed really cares.
http://www.sundayherald.com/27877
How Did the Iraqi Opposition Come into Existence? (1-6-03)
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US plans military rule and occupation of Iraq
Saddam would be replaced by General Tommy Franks
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday October 12, 2002
The Guardian
The US has plans to establish an American-led military administration in Iraq, similar to the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, which could last for several years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.
The plans, which surfaced after President George Bush won a resounding congressional mandate to use force in Iraq, envisage the biggest "nation-building" effort the US has undertaken since the end of the second world war.
The occupation of the country would need an estimated 75,000 troops, at an annual cost of up to $16bn (£10bn), and would almost certainly include British and other allied soldiers. It would be run by a senior American officer, perhaps General Tommy Franks, who would lead the assault on Iraq, and whose role would be modelled on that of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan.
The occupation regime would track down war criminals and remove members of President Saddam's Ba'ath party from power, comb the country for any hidden biological and chemical weapons, and guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity. It would also administer the country's huge oil deposits.
Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the opposition Iraqi National Congress who is visiting Washington this week, gave the plan a qualified welcome yesterday. He said he would prefer an interim Iraqi government to be established in the immediate aftermath of President Saddam's fall, but would accept a foreign administration as a temporary precursor to a true democracy.
"We are concerned first with the liberation of Iraq," he told the Guardian, adding that he had "no idea" how long such a transitional period would last. He said it was "very, very clear it is going to be a huge development in the Arab world".
Mr Chalabi denied that such a large-scale prolonged US military presence would destabilise the region, but an Arab diplomat in Washington said it could have an "explosive" impact in the Middle East, where the US military presence has already proven a rallying cry for militants including Osama bin Laden.
The Iraqi project, outlined by Mr Bush's senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, would involve running the entire country until a democratic Iraqi government was deemed ready.
A British official stressed yesterday that although contingency plans were undoubtedly being drawn up, London had not agreed to such a strategy. "It seems this is coming from the right end of the [political] spectrum. I don't know if this is mainstream thinking in the administration," the official said.
US officials said no final decision had been taken on the plan, but indicated that some form of direct American military rule was almost inevitable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,810609,00.html
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February 17, 2003
The Independent
Kurdish leaders enraged by 'undemocratic' American plan to occupy Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, northern Iraq
The US is abandoning plans to introduce democracy in Iraq after a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, according to Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials.
The Kurds say the decision resulted from pressure from US allies in the Middle East who fear a war will lead to radical political change in the region.
The Kurdish leaders are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers.
It undercuts the argument by George Bush and Tony Blair that war is justified by the evil nature of the regime in Baghdad.
"Conquerors always call themselves liberators," said Sami Abdul-Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish administration, in a reference to Mr Bush's speech last week in which he said US troops were going to liberate Iraq.
Mr Abdul-Rahman said the US had reneged on earlier promises to promote democratic change in Iraq. "It is very disappointing," he said. "In every Iraqi ministry they are just going to remove one or two officials and replace them with American military officers."
Kurdish officials strongly believe the new US policy is the result of pressure from regional powers, notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The US appears to be quietly abandoning earlier declarations that it would make Iraq a model democracy in the Middle East. In Iraq, free elections would lead to revolutionary change because although the Shia Muslims and Kurds constitute three-quarters of the population, they are excluded from power in Baghdad by the Sunni Muslim establishment.
Kurdish leaders are deeply alarmed by US intentions, which only became clear at a meeting in Ankara earlier in the month and from recent public declarations by US officials. Hoshyar Zebari, a veteran Kurdish leader, said: "If the US wants to impose its own government, regardless of the ethnic and religious composition of Iraq, there is going to be a backlash."
Mr Abdul-Rahman accuses the US of planning cosmetic changes in Iraq. "This is to give the government on a platter to the second line of Ba'athists [the ruling party]," he said.
The US appears to be returning to the policy it pursued at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. It did seek to get rid of President Saddam but wanted to avoid a radical change in Iraq. The US did not support the uprisings of Shia Muslims and Kurds because it feared a transformation in Iraqi politics that might have destabilised its allies in the Middle East or benefited Iran.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=379060
Future of Post-war Iraq Divides Bush Administration (2-18-03)
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February 21, 2003
The Washington Post
Full U.S. Control Planned for Iraq
by Karen DeYoung and Peter Slevin
The Bush administration plans to take complete, unilateral control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, with an interim administration headed by a yet-to-be named American civilian who would direct the reconstruction of the country and the creation of a "representative" Iraqi government, according to a now-finalized blueprint described by U.S. officials and other sources.
Officials said the decision to install U.S. military and civilian administrations for an indeterminate time stems from lessons learned in Afghanistan, where power has been diffused among U.S. military forces still waging war against the remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, a multinational security force of several thousand troops in which the United States does not participate, and the interim government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The administration is particularly keen on averting interference by other regional powers, and cites the "ability of people like the Iranians and others to go in with money and create warlords" sympathetic to their own interests, one official said. "We don't want a weak federal government that plays into the hands of regional powers" and allows Iraq to be divided into de facto spheres of influence. "We don't want the Iranians to be paying the Shiites, the Turks the Turkmen and the Saudis the Sunnis," the official, referring to some of the main groups among dozens of Iraqi tribes and ethnic and religious groups.
A similar anxiety led to the decision to prohibit the Iraqi opposition based outside the country from forming a provisional government. The chief proponent of that idea, Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, was informed this week that any move to declare a provisional Iraqi government "would result in a formal break in the U.S.-INC relationship," the official said.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0221-01.htm
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October 12, 2002
Saved by U.S., Kuwait Now Shows Mixed Feelings
By CRAIG S. SMITH
KUWAIT, Oct. 11 — Muhammad al-Mulaifi, head of the information department at Kuwait's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, tried momentarily to suppress a smile, then broke into a broad grin when asked if he supported the terrorist attacks on the United States last year.
"I would be lying if said I wasn't happy about the attack," he said, sitting on the floor of his air-conditioned home office, a carpeted, cushioned oasis amid the harsh heat of this small, dry country. Mr. Mulaifi said that many Kuwaitis were delighted about what had happened to the United States and that he had attended parties held in celebration.
"Only then did we see America suffer for a few seconds what Muslims have been suffering for a long time," he said.
His view is not an uncommon one among Muslims in this part of the world, but it is surprising coming from someone whose country the United States rescued from Iraqi domination just over 11 years ago.
And although Mr. Mulaifi may not be in the majority on this issue, his opinions do represent the extreme end of an anti-American sentiment that is spreading among Kuwait's 800,000 people.
Despite lingering gratitude toward the United States for having driven Iraqi troops from Kuwait, many Kuwaitis now want the American military to leave the region. Some blame the United States for not having ousted Mr. Hussein in 1991, arguing that he was left in power so Washington could strengthen its military presence here. Few Kuwaitis support an American invasion now, though the United States would most likely use Kuwait as a base during any war.
"America kept playing this game, insisting that Saddam posed a great threat to Kuwait to justify their long-term presence in the gulf," Nasser al-Khonais, a 31-year-old librarian at Kuwait's Ministry of Education, said.
Toppling Mr. Hussein now, he said, is simply a cynical exercise to warn other countries in the region that America can change any government when it wants.
Passions would most likely be inflamed if the Bush administration acted on its proposals to set up an occupation government in Iraq after ousting Mr. Hussein. Such a move would confirm the theory that America's policy toward Iraq has been an elaborate plot to dominate the region.
The attack this week in a country that is often referred to as America's staunchest ally in the Persian Gulf gives some measure of the depth and breadth of the anti-American feeling growing among young Arabs across the region.
"If pampered, wealthy Kuwaitis raised in pro-American afterglow of the gulf war could do this, imagine what a poor Yemeni warrior will do," Mr. Mulaifi said.
Mr. Mulaifi says he is not a Qaeda member, but is "close to Al Qaeda thought." He is cagey on whether he remains in contact with the group ("That's a C.I.A question," he said), but claims knowledge of its plans.
He said the network had postponed a major attack that would surpass Sept. 11, so that it would occur just after any American invasion of Iraq, when a strike against the United States would win the most support in the Arab world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/12/international/middleeast/12KUWA.html?todaysheadlines
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August 25, 2002
Drowning Freedom in Oil
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In a recent tour of India, I was visiting with an Indian Muslim community leader, Syed Shahabuddin, and the conversation drifted to the question of why the Muslim world seems so angry with the West. "Whenever I am in America," he said, "people ask me, `Why do they hate us?' They don't hate you. If they hated you, would they send their kids to be educated by you? Would they look up to you as a model? They hate that you are monopolizing all the nonrenewable resources [oil]. And because you want to do that, you need to keep in power all your collaborators. As a consequence, you support feudal elements who are trying to stave off the march of democracy."
The more I've traveled in the Muslim world since 9/11, the more it has struck me how true this statement is: Nothing has subverted Middle East democracy more than the Arab world's and Iran's dependence on oil, and nothing will restrict America's ability to tell the truth in the Middle East and promote democracy there more than our continued dependence on oil.
Yet, since Sept. 11, the Bush-Cheney team has not lifted a finger to make us, or the Arab-Islamic world, less dependent on oil. Too bad. Because politics in countries dependent on oil becomes totally focused on who controls the oil revenues — rather than on how to improve the skills and education of both their men and women, how to build a rule of law and a legitimate state in which people feel some ownership, and how to build an honest economy that is open and attractive to investors.
In short, countries with oil can flourish under repression — as long as they just drill a hole in the right place. Think of Saudi Arabia, Libya or Iraq. Countries without oil can flourish only if they drill their own people's minds and unlock their energies with the keys of freedom. Think of Japan, Taiwan or India.
Do you think the unpopular mullahs in Iran would be able to hold power today if they didn't have huge oil revenues to finance their merchant cronies and security services? Do you think Saudi Arabia would be able to keep most of its women unemployed and behind veils if it didn't have petrodollars to replace their energies? Do you think it is an accident that the most open and democratizing Arab countries — Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Dubai and Qatar — are those with either no oil or dwindling oil reserves? They've had to learn how to tap the talents of their people rather than their sand dunes.
The Pentagon is now debating whether Saudi Arabia is our enemy. Yes and no. There is a secularized, U.S.-educated, pro-American elite and middle class in Saudi Arabia, who are not America's enemies. They are good people, and you can't visit Saudi Arabia without meeting them. We should never forget that.
But the Saudi ruling family stays in power not by a democratic vote from these progressives. It stays in power through a bargain with the conservative Wahhabi Muslim religious establishment. The Wahhabi clerics bless the regime and give it legitimacy — in the absence of any democratic elections. In return, the regime gives the Wahhabis oil money, which they use to propagate a puritanical version of Islam that is hostile to the West, to women, to modernity and to all non-Muslim faiths.
This bargain suits the Saudi rulers well. If they empowered the secularized, pro-American Saudis, it would not be long before they demanded things like transparency in budgeting, accountability and representation. The Wahhabi religious establishment, by contrast, doesn't care how corrupt the ruling family is in private — as long it keeps paying off the clerics and gives them a free hand to impose Wahhabi dogma on Saudi society, media and education, and to export it abroad.
So while there are many moderate Saudis who do not threaten us, there is no moderate Saudi ruling bargain. The one that exists does threaten us by giving huge oil resources to the Wahhabi conservatives, which they use to build mosques and schools that preach against tolerance, pluralism and modernity across the Muslim world — and in America. And it is our oil addiction that keeps us from ever confronting the Saudis on this. Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.
Until we face up to that — and curb our consumption and encourage alternative energies that will slowly bring the price of oil down and force these countries to open up and adapt to modernity — we can invade Iraq once a week and it's not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/25/opinion/25FRIE.html
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