In Defense of Dr. Chalabi - Who Is Lakhdar Brahimi?

23 April 2004 KurdishMedia.com - By Agit Can The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States marked a bloody beginning to a new era in international relations. Large-scale international terrorism was no longer a distant threat confined to the Middle East – it had now hit two major American cities and taken the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. US President George W. Bush declared a war on terror, aimed at weakening and eliminating terrorist threats to the US and the civilized world. Weeks after the largest terrorist attacks ever on US soil, President Bush decided not to waste time building an international consensus and began to strike at terrorists and their supporters in Afghanistan. After toppling the fundamentalist Taliban regime and defying critics’ predictions of a Soviet-style quagmire in Afghanistan, the President began a swift campaign to eliminate the regime of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a dictator with a proven record of using weapons of mass destruction on civilians and supporting anti-American terrorist organizations.

Regime change in Iraq was long overdue. Since the criminal abandonment of the popular uprising against the Iraqi Ba’athist regime in 1991, US policy with regards to Iraq consisted of tough words, headline-grabbing but strategically meaningless military actions, and support of sanctions against Iraq that were manipulated by the Ba’athist criminals to hurt only the masses. Following the 1991 war, an Iraqi opposition to the Ba’athist regime took form and Dr. Ahmed Chalabi, a Western-educated Shi’i Iraqi, emerged as one of its most prominent and able leaders.

As Dr. Chalabi rose to prominence, he earned himself a large, diverse group of dedicated opponents, composed of Ba’athists, supporters of Arab dictatorships, so-called anti-war activists, and others opposed to the elimination of the Iraqi Ba’athist regime. This diverse group of opponents attacked Dr. Chalabi and his party, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which venom that they never thought of directing toward the Iraqi dictatorship responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, Muslims, and others. While Dr. Chalabi was a favorite of certain groups within the US governmental and defense establishment, he was also the favorite target of this large group of hypocrites and dissimulators who hid their true motivations while claiming fight for peace, honesty, and self-determination.

The most recent issue of the popular and well-established American news magazine Time, dated April 26, 2004, contains an unprofessional and unfounded attack on Dr. Chalabi artfully disguised as professional journalistic reporting. In reality, this piece, “Chalabi’s Fall From Grace”, is, at best, half reporting and half editorializing, and the editorialized portion is based on information that, at best, could be described as half-truths.

“Chalabi’s Fall From Grace” begins in the manner of both a fairy tale and a eulogy as it sets the stage for the telling of a classic Greek tragedy:

The clear implication is that Dr. Chalabi, once an influential man, has now disappeared from the political scene, become irrelevant, or perhaps died.

It does not take long for the TIME writers to disregard facts when building their case against Dr. Chalabi:

“In April 2003, on the day Saddam’s statue was toppled, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and his 600-man militia, dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces, into southern Iraq. Chalabi’s operatives helped U.S. forces track down members of Saddam’s regime and collect troves of valuable documents, and the U.S. rewarded him with a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council.”

In fact, Dr. Chalabi and the Free Iraqi Forces arrived in Iraq previous to the famous toppling of the statue on April 9, 2003. I personally received a report of his arrival in Nasiriya on April 7, 2003. This fabrication of the facts sets the stage for Time’s most shocking, and nonsensical, revelation:

“With Iraq’s political future increasingly in the hands of the United Nations, Chalabi faces being cut out.”

I am not so sure about the United Nations’ role in Iraq’s political future – or its current affairs. Following the bombing of the UN’s headquarters in Baghdad on August 20, 2003, the UN pulled out nearly all of its non-Iraqi employees from Iraq, relocating them far away to Jordan and Cyprus. As a senior member of Iraq’s interim government told me, “One bomb and they left!” The UN, an international club in midtown Manhattan dominated by representatives of unelected dictatorships, consistently recognized the Iraqi Ba’athist regime as the legitimate government of Iraq, and spent infinitely more time addressing alleged crimes committed by democracies than genocide committed by Saddam against the people of Iraq. This is the same UN meets to discuss the assassination of Palestinian terrorist leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, a man who made plain his genocidal intentions plain by boasting that his movement “will not leave one Jew in Palestine”, congratulated his suicide bombers for “teach[ing] the Jewish mothers in Haifa, Tel Aviv and everywhere that our blood is not cheap”, and stating the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia was “part of the divine punishment of America and, together with it, Zionism”.

Of course, while the UN could spare time to be outraged over the assassination of this mass murdering terrorist, it could not take concrete steps to protect the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein, a mass murderer recognized as a legitimate leader by the UN who dwarfed Rantisi, perhaps not in rhetoric but certainly in body count. Meanwhile, the UN, who left Iraq after one bomb, shows no eagerness to return to Iraq and prefers to let the US and coalition soldiers sort things out before playing any role in the reconstruction of the wounded nation. Kofi Annan has said as much just this month, stating, “For the foreseeable future, insecurity is going to be a major constraint for us. And so I cannot say right now that I am going to be sending in a large U.N. team.” Do those who vocally call for the UN to administer Iraq realize that the UN is unwilling to do so? Such a call is tantamount for calling for former President Richard Nixon to formulate America’s USSR policy for 2005 – Nixon is dead and the USSR no longer exists, so why waste time with such a demand?

Time continues by providing its most damning indictment of Dr. Chalabi, stating:

“U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi is said to dislike him, and U.N. sources say there will probably be no place for Chalabi in the appointed government taking control after June 30.”

I am assuming that this is to be taken seriously, although it reads like political humor. If Brahimi’s association with the UN is not enough to discredit him, one need only to do a cursory examination of Brahimi’s past to see why he should be irrelevant to the future of Iraq. From 1984 to 1991, he was Under-Secretary-General of the League of Arab States (Arab League), an organization preoccupied with defending Arab dictatorships and paying lip service to the Palestinian cause (while doing nothing material to help the Palestinians living in Arab countries, let alone those elsewhere). This is the same Arab League that declared the elimination of Saddam’s genocidal regime to be “a threat to world peace” in March 2003. This is the same Arab League that has consistently supported the rights of Arab dictators to oppress the peoples of the Middle East, Arab and non-Arab alike.

It is most curious that Brahimi was a high official of the Arab League at the height of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against Iraq’s Kurds. While persecution of the indigenous Kurds of Iraq continued through 1988 and 1989, the Arab League remained silent on the mass murder committed by Saddam Hussein and his regime, meeting months and hundreds of deaths later in May 1990 in Baghdad to express support for the Iraqi dictator’s renewal of a strong anti-West stance. The disregard for genocide of the Kurds and the non-Kurdish people of Iraq, as well as the explicitly pro-Saddam Arab League conference both took place when Brahimi was a high official of this club of dictators. Now Brahimi’s “dislike” of Dr. Chalabi is supposed to mean something in post-Saddam Iraq? Anyone familiar with the background of Brahimi, a man who embraced former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz on Iraqi TV in 1997, should not be surprised that Brahimi “dislikes” Dr. Chalabi. Indeed, Dr. Chalabi should recognize this dislike as a badge of honor and a confirmation of his pro-democracy credentials. I can only assume that Dr. Chalabi would rather not be embraced by the same arms that once warmly received Tariq Aziz. Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz are both in US custody, and the Iraqi Ba’athist regime is no longer an ongoing nightmare but rather a bad memory. In this new era, what place is there for the 70 year old Arabist Brahimi?

As Time’s attack against Dr. Chalabi continues, unprofessional bias is made evident as the writers copy techniques from the Arab media and use inflammatory language to provoke an emotional response:

“When the CIA refused to provide weapons to his ragtag band of mercenaries, the Pentagon armed them over the agency’s objections.”

The word “mercenary” is a very charged word. It has the connotation of a professional soldier who has no emotional or ideological attachments and fights only for monetary reward. Mercenaries are bought and sold, and their business is death. Dr. Chalabi’s men, the Free Iraqi Forces, were not mercenaries. Rather, they are Iraqis who gave up more comfortable lives in exile to help liberate their homeland. Time’s use of the mercenary label is as libelous as it is inaccurate. Either the news magazine is not familiar with the facts, which seems possible, or it chooses to manufacture its own half-truths to prove an invalid point. The article later states:

“Among Iraqis, Chalabi, dogged by charges that he mishandled U.S. funds and convicted in absentia in 1991 of bank fraud in Jordan — he has always maintained his innocence — has failed to shake his image as a carpetbagger.”

If Time magazine is willing to imply that the charge of bank fraud is valid and beyond question, then I think the magazine’s integrity is questionable. Jordan was a staunch ally of Saddam Hussein in 1980’s and in 1991, allowing imports to arrive in Iraq via the Jordanian port of Aqaba when the Iran-Iraq war blocked Iraqi outlets to the sea. In 1991, posters of Saddam Hussein were plastered throughout Jordan. Is it surprising that a Jordanian court convicted Dr. Chalabi of a crime in 1991, the same year that the late King of Jordan Hussein called Saddam Hussein an “Arab patriot”? And can a verdict reached in absentia under a pro-Saddam dictatorship carry much weight?

Dr. Chalabi is wealthy, well-educated man who gave up a comfortable life in the West to become the most recognizable opponent of Saddam Hussein, a genocidal dictator who was fond of torturing and murdering not only his foes but also their families. It should go without mentioning that Dr. Chalabi took great personal risks to fight the Iraqi Ba’athist regime. He was not giving orders from a comfortable villa abroad – at first opportunity he went to liberated Iraqi Kurdistan to fight the Ba’athist regime. While the Dr. Chalabi’s critics are keen to paint him as an outsider and opportunist, the Kurds of Iraq have not forgotten that his INC made great efforts to mediate between the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union Kurdistan (PUK) during the terrible “brother killing” war in Iraqi Kurdistan of the mid-1990’s. While many of those claiming to be pro-Iraqi supported a perpetuation of the genocidal Ba’athist regime, Dr. Chalabi and the INC were on the ground in Iraq attempting to bring peace to Iraqis. For whatever reason, this is not remembered, while Dr. Chalabi’s conviction in absentia of a crime by a court controlled by a pro-Saddam regime remains an infinitely more important “fact” in the mind of so many.

Dr. Chalabi’s future in Iraq is for him, and the Iraqi people, to decide. His personal contribution to the liberation of Iraq cannot be disputed. Time magazine’s team of editorializing journalists could better spend their time investigating why the 70 year old relic of Arabist delusion and mass murder named Lakhdar Brahimi is being forced upon Iraq. This would be a more valuable endeavor than manipulating facts to defame Dr. Chalabi.

Brahimi's appointment is a big slap in the face to the coalition and the Iraqi people that want a better future. We need to fumigate the U.N., but since the dems cannot have a foriegn policy without U.N. cover, I don't see it happening. Wolfowitz was pointing out to Jesse Jackson Jr.in a hearing on Cspan today that no one has completely accurate intelligence, but that Chalabi's organization has saved several American soldiers lives with their intel and so you take the good info with the bad.

The only thing we can expect from the U.N. is abject failure and corruption. No wonder the dems want to wrap themselves in U.N. cover...their common character traits of lying,distortion, and deception makes them feel right at home!

Gee, we can support the pro-American Chalabi or the anti-American, anti-Israel Brahimi.

I wonder who France would prefer?

The Axis of weasels were cut out of the reconstruction of Iraq because they supported the enemy. So did the UN. The UN and its treacherous league of spies and criminals should be excluded from Iraq, and hopefully soon, from America.

If we can accomplish free elections in Iraq, perhaps the Iraqi PEOPLE WHO CARE ENOUGHT TO VOTE will tell us what they think of Dr. Chalabi. Personally, I think the people would vote for him and that's why Brahimi and co. don't want him around long enough for free elections ... the islamofacists would love to kill him, too! Look to how the Kurds have dealt with Chalabi and others, to measure the metal of the man. The Kurds can be our measuring rod ... freedom will happen in Iraq.

Oh, the irony of Jesse Jackson Jr giving Wolfie grief about the $350,000 salary we pay Chalabi. Jackson failed to mention that the money goes to a group headed by Chalabi, and not to Chalabi personally.

Sort of reminds me of Operation Rainbow Push, except Chalabi is probably held to greater standards of accountability.

You are absolutely right about the salary issue! Every time I hear this brought up in the news it is made to sound like Chalabi is getting all that money himself! I'm embarrased to admit that I fell for it the first time I heard it, although it didn't bother me because I knew there must be more to the story since the dems and their media cohorts were determined to smear him.

I also did not know that Jordan was so pro Saddam when the bank fraud charges were leveled as this article points out. I always know when the innuendoes and smears begin by the left, that the person under fire must be doing good things or be particularly effective against leftist propaganda. :)

the problem with the bank fraud charge is that it was a charge applied by a saddam-friendly government (jordan) a few weeks after ahmed chalabi had gone public with detailed documents that outlined arms deals between king hussein and saddam. it was also the same year (1992) that the iraqi national congress was formed by chalabi. the backbone of the INC were the two major kurdish parties, the KDP and PUK and they remained the backbone of the opposition to the saddam regime.

the court which convicted chalabi was a jordanian special security court that considered and deliberated over the evidence for an entire 24 hours before issuing a 200+ page conviction against chalabi for bank fraud. imagine something like that happening with enron, for example.

the founding conference of the INC was in june, 1992 in vienna. SCIRI and al-Daw'a attended this conference, but did not participate. the kurds were well represented. the second conference was held in salahuddin, iraqi kurdistan--hosted by the kurds--in october, 1992, at which time the congress was expanded from 160 delegates to 234, and SCIRI joined the INC.

casting doubt on chalabi's name also casts doubt on the entire INC and it's major backers, the kurds.

the charge of questionable bank practices has much less to do with finances than to do with politics.

"...I suspect the only person some of our media mavens would find acceptable would be a declared communist."

does a former-communist-turned-moderate count?

"As prime minister, a favorite of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad is Planning Minister Mahdi Hafez, the Shiite minister of planning who met Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other senior U.S. and U.N. officials during a quiet visit to the United States last week, U.S. officials said. Hafez, a former communist who became a moderate, is considered a capable technocrat who could lead a caretaker government until elections are held early next year, U.S. and Iraqi officials said ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59758-2004May1.html )."

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