Is this man leading us to war with Iraq?

Guardian/UK ^ | 4/10/02 | Henry Porter

[kattracks]

When Dr Ahmad Chalabi talks about toppling Saddam Hussein, the US hawks listen. Henry Porter meets the Iraqi dissident who wants to free his country by any means

Saddam Hussein will go. George Bush has decided, and Tony Blair, after commuting between positions of support and relative caution through the winter, has given his wholehearted backing. Regardless of what Labour MPs say, or what happens in Europe and the UN, it seems likely that by the end of the year the greatly enhanced missiles of America's arsenal will be raining down on strategic sites throughout Iraq.

Whatever we think about the prospect of a war in the Middle East at this extremely fragile moment, the statements over the weekend from Crawford, Texas, represent a considerable victory for Dr Ahmad Chalabi, who is one of six members of the leadership council of the dissident Iraqi National Congress (INC), its chief strategist and head of intelligence.

Chalabi goes unrecognised as he walks in the spring sunshine in London, which is probably a good thing because the last count put the number of attempts on his life at nine. There have probably been others he hasn't known about and it is certain that there is never a moment when Saddam's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, is not dreaming up a way of killing him.

Under this threat, Chalabi is relaxed and purposeful. "I don't like to talk about attempts on my life. The details are sordid - thallium, rockets, car bombs, snipers. Many of our people have been killed by thallium [poison]. There have been many deaths in northern Iraq - that's what matters."

He leads me through the foyer of an anonymous office block in central London, talking about the works of ancient Assyrian art looted by Saddam. We take the lift up to a floor where there are two security doors and more cameras than you would expect. At length we come to another door and are let into a study. There is a leather suite, contemporary Iraqi paintings and two walls of books which include the World of Parrots, Plato, Isaiah Berlin and many volumes of history. He spends a lot of his time in this room, plotting, but when he really needs to get away he vanishes into the stacks of the London Library and reads whatever his eye happens to fall upon.

Chalabi, an MIT graduate with a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, is a promiscuous and retentive reader. It shows in his conversation which typically darts between number theory, ancient cultures and current espionage techniques. As he talks his mouth forms a boomerang smile that reaches up to a pair of glittering eyes.

In many ways he is like a character from 19th-century fiction, improbably lit with intelligence, charm and sensibility and at the same time blessed with the darker gifts of the spy and master of intrigue. Among the things he does very successfully from the room where we talk is to run a spy network across Iraq.

More than anyone he is responsible for alerting the west to the build-up of weapons of mass destruction since the Unscom inspectors left Iraq four years ago. The information is not just rumour; it is high-grade intelligence, concerning plans, locations, expenditure and named personnel.

INC information is by far the best coming out of Iraq, but the CIA under director George Tenet won't have anything to do with him. And when Chalabi saw Colin Powell in the distance at the state department the other day, the US secretary of state waved weakly and made off in the opposite direction. Even now, as Bush prepares for war with Saddam, the state department does everything in its power to hinder Chalabi and limit his influence.

He has some friends in Washington DC, principally at the Pentagon and among the staff of the Defence Intelligence Agency. According to the former CIA officer Bob Baer, whose book See No Evil was published last month, Chalabi's influence is now stronger than it was because, as Baer puts it: "He talks their language. He knows how to make himself clear and knows what they want to hear. He doesn't go round in circles like every Arab you ever sat down with in the Middle East."

Of much greater importance are the defectors the INC has smuggled out of Iraq and served up to the Americans. Recently the product of these debriefings has been hitting the desk in the oval office. But it has been around for a while. In 1995 the head of military intelligence, General Wafic Sammarai, defected with Dr Khidir Hamza, head of the nuclear programmes who worked on Saddam's bomb. Late last year a building contractor and engineer - still unidentified - came out with information that the DIA called "spectacular".

Chalabi couldn't be more pleased by the outcome of the Crawford summit. He is unabashed by his part in engineering the current state of high alert because of one simple reason: he is a freedom fighter and wants nothing more than to introduce democracy to his country. "We want a government that respects human rights, based on a constitution, free elections and a federal structure. But it is an oddly revolutionary idea. It leads to a great deal of disquiet among US allies. That is reflected in the hordes of organisations that talk to the state department and CIA about repressive Arab regimes, chiefly Saudia Arabia." He refers to the lobbyists who are at pains to reinforce the orthodoxy that Arab states can only be run by strong men and platoons of psychopaths, armed with electrodes and scalpels.

This is the third time I have met Chalabi. I am always struck by the clarity and reasonableness of his ambitions, but it is important to remind oneself that he is a skilled manipulator who spends his time thinking how to hasten a war against a man who a) is now immeasurably better armed than he was in 1990; b) will probably strike at Israel the moment he is attacked; and c) will use anything he can when the chips are down - including dirty nukes and biological warfare.

As Chalabi admits, if Saddam can go out having killed 100,000 Israelis, his ambition to live on in Arab memory as a modern Saladin will be achieved. The stakes are high, which accounts for the pallor of British ministers and officials who have seen some of the recent estimates of Saddam's arsenal and his plans.

Chalabi feels that the single greatest mistake of the western governments is that they haven't communicated their fears and knowledge to the public. Besides this, he also points out that the US is bound by an act of congress to seeing democracy introduced in Iraq.

Little happened after the bill was passed by congress during the last Clinton administration because of what Chalabi believes to be deep-rooted prejudice. "It's an attitude which nearly borders on racism. There is an infernal circle working which says the Iraqi people must be savages because they allow Saddam to rule them. Ergo they cannot be democrats and Saddam has to be replaced by another strong man.

"The myopia of the left when it thinks of Iraq is principally caused by residues of third-worldism. But they also think that because the US is targeting Saddam, Saddam must have redeeming features. Let me tell you, Saddam has no redeeming features."

One of the defectors brought out by the INC last year, General Abu Zenab of the Mukhabarat, underlines this. With his stories of torture, random arrests and the killings of thousands of young men after the 1995 uprising, he evoked a landscape of unending darkness for the American team sent to debrief him. He spoke without the slightest whisper of conscience or any sense, for instance, that raping a woman in his custody was not a perk of the job enjoyed by security boys the world over. Another defector has recently told how children have been tortured to gain confessions from their parents.

But between now and any realisation of Chalabi's dream almost certainly stands a war - and one which could sprawl through the Middle East - and then an arduous unification process involving two Islamic sects (the Sunni and Shi'a), three racial groups (Arab, Turkoman and Kurdish) and numerous clans. As the former CIA director Richard Helms advised: "Pay attention to the things that are hundreds of years old - the religious sects and the tribes." Three quarters of Iraqis are members of one the country's 150 tribal clans.

Chalabi is a Shi'a but says he has no special brief for the Shi'as and anyway does not harbour ambitions of standing for office if and when Saddam is overthrown. "This is about creating a civil society, liberating Arab history from despotism. The thing about a civil society is that there are common ideas about how it should be run - what people think of taxation, health and education services. That is what binds them now."

This is the vision of a cunning and humane optimist. It will be greeted with scepticism by many, but it is extremely difficult to argue with an Arab intellectual who wants nothing more than to give his people the freedoms enjoyed in the west.

[RJayneJ]

[xm177e2]

Little happened after the bill was passed by congress during the last Clinton administration because of what Chalabi believes to be deep-rooted prejudice. "It's an attitude which nearly borders on racism. There is an infernal circle working which says the Iraqi people must be savages because they allow Saddam to rule them. Ergo they cannot be democrats and Saddam has to be replaced by another strong man.

"The myopia of the left when it thinks of Iraq is principally caused by residues of third-worldism. But they also think that because the US is targeting Saddam, Saddam must have redeeming features. Let me tell you, Saddam has no redeeming features."

He sounds good to me.