It is sometimes fun – in a grim sort of way – to trawl back through some of the predictions that were being made in the United States, just before the invasion of Iraq. Of all the various delusional statements that were made at the time, one of my favourites comes from Richard Perle – then head of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Advisory board. Perle was debating with Daniel Cohn Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament and once a rock-throwing revolutionary on the streets of Paris in 1968. As Cohn Bendit pointed out, by 2003 the two mens’ positions had been reversed. When it came to Iraq, it was Perle who was the revolutionary and Cohn Bendit, who was the cautious conservative. During the course of their discussion (which is worth reading in its entirety – it’s quite short), Cohn Bendit suggested that there was a risk that the Americans might be seen as occupiers in Iraq. This elicited the following Perle of wisdom:

Perle: You are imagining a US general riding roughshod over Iraqis and confirming the worst fears of Muslims around the world that we are an aggressive, imperialist power. I have another view. We have Ahmed Chalabi, chief of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, to enter Baghdad. Ending the current Iraqi regime will liberate the Iraqis. We will leave both governance and oil in their hands. We will hand over power quickly—not in years, maybe not even in months—to give Iraqis a chance to shape their own destiny. The whole world will see this. And I expect the Iraqis to be at least as thankful as French President Jacques Chirac was for France’s liberation.

It’s all there, isn’t it? The prediction that the United States will be out within weeks; the “we will be greeted as liberators” optimism. And – a real period piece – the veneration of Ahmed Chalabi, as the future leader of a free Iraq.

I met Chalabi in London today. He is back on the think tank circuit and was giving a speech to Policy Exchange, a conservative group. As you may know, he never did enter Baghdad at the head of the “Free Iraqi” forces. Indeed little more than a year after the fall of Baghdad, Chalabi had fallen out spectacularly with the Americans. In the summer of 2004 his offices were raided – and he was subsequently accused of passing intelligence to the Iranians and fraud (as his Wikipedia entry details).

Even then, however, his Pentagon sponsors were still behind him. I remember spending a bizarre evening in the summer of 2004 with a senior Pentagon official who was railing at the fact that “our guy” (Chalabi) has been kept out of power by “their guy” – in other words the CIA’s “guy”, who was Ayad Allawi, who had just been made interim prime minister of Iraq.

But by May 2004, it looked as if – outside of the Pentagon - Chalabi’s reputation had finally gone south. Newsweek labelled him “one of the greatest con men in history”. After the flurry of publicity surrounding his arrest, Chalabi disappeared off many people’s radar screens in America and Britain. But the man is clearly a survivor. The raids never came to anything and in April 2005, less than a year after the infamous raid, he was installed as deputy prime minister of Iraq. By November 2005 he was once again doing the rounds in Washington – paying calls on Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. The following month, however, his party flopped in the Iraqi elections. And last May he was dropped from the government.

Watching Chalabi perform in the flesh, you can see why so many influential people in Washington were taken with him. He is fluent, succinct and has a dry sense of humour. His analysis is as gloomy as the next man’s – the violence is out of control; the Americans have too few troops; the police and army are dysfunctional and tribal; billions have been embezzled; it is impractical to disband the militias in the current security climate; Iraq’s neighbours have no interest in seeing democracy take root there; the insurgency in Anbar province is “entirely Al-Qaida”. Oh - and Iraqi electricity generation is below Saddam-era levels and tonnes of untreated sewage are being dumped into the Tigris every day.

But in one significant respect, Chalabi’s message now differs markedly from that of his original neo-con sponsors. While they are clearly itching to take on Iran, Chalabi is urging reconciliation. He argues that the Iranians would be willing to play a positive role in stabilising Iraq, if Iran could be assured that the new Iraq would not then be used as base to attack them. Chalabi wants to convene a regional peace conference and worries that – “Iraq is being turned into a battleground between Iran and the United States.” But even though a respectable crowd turned out to see Chalabi today, I have the feeling that the man’s audience is dwindling away.

November 2nd, 2006 in Iraq | Permalink