Chalabi Believes US Forces Will Find Weapons of Mass Destruction

The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, says he believes there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that U.S. and coalition forces will be able to find them.

In recent days, Mr. Chalabi has been making speeches and appearing on television news programs saying former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is alive and in hiding, and is financing efforts to de-stabilize the U.S.-led coalition.

The former exile opposition leader, who was flown into Iraq in the early days of the coalition advance on Baghdad, says coalition forces will eventually find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi has been denying reports that information his group provided to U.S. forces was faulty or that it was manipulated by the Bush administration. But he said U.S. forces need to do a better job of working with various Iraqi groups who opposed Saddam if they are to find the weapons. "There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Saddam had them and he was developing them continuously. And I think if there is a correct way to look for them, then they will be found," he said.

Mr. Chalabi declined to identify the Iraqis he said may hold the key to locating the weapons, but he said those same people can help locate Saddam Hussein. "If we look for him in an intelligent way, and that the energy against him and against the Baath party that is prevalent among the Iraqi people, is mobilized and channeled to work in tandem with U.S. forces, I think he will be found," he said.

Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress played a central role in persuading members of Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1998.

The act put Congress on record in support of regime change in Iraq, and was cited by the Bush administration in its initial draft of a congressional resolution to authorize U.S.-led military action.

Congressman Christopher Cox, who appeared with Mr. Chalabi, said lawmakers wanted to meet with Mr. Chalabi, almost five years after the Iraq Liberation Act was enacted,to assess what has been achieved. "We discussed today issues ranging from the pace of reconstruction and the prospects for the adoption of a constitution and a referendum on that constitution in Iraq, to the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and the resources that he might command," he said.

Mr. Chalabi describes as exaggerated, reports of opposition by Iraqi Shiite Muslims to the U.S.-led occupation. To the contrary, he says, the "overriding sentiment" of Iraqis is gratitude and thanks for being freed from Saddam Hussein's rule.

He also denied he is pressing the Bush administration to modify current plans for a political council during the transition to a civilian administration.

Mr. Chalabi says he is working closely with Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, on steps that will "take Iraq quickly into a democratic representative government."

I saw Chalabi also -- not this interview, but on previous occasions. I agree with you, I think he has a good understanding of the situation. He also has a Ph.D is Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Here is an interesting article about him:

http://www.spongobongo.com/0her9798.htm/

June 20, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
After Saddam
The controversy over Ahmad Chalabi.

By Max Singer

While much attention is paid to the consensus in Washington that Saddam Hussein must be replaced, the debate over his successor has largely been hidden.

Yet the question of who would replace Saddam is a critical component of U.S. strategy, both with respect to how Saddam should be ousted and the American vision for the Middle East.

The debate over who should succeed Saddam begins with Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi opposition movement, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). People who know him well think he has the potential to be one of the great Arab leaders of this century. But there are widely divergent judgments about Chalabi among senior American policymakers and among those counted as experts on the Middle East.

The State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and the experts associated with them believe that Chalabi is a small-time opportunist and playboy trying to use his position in the INC to make something for himself.

They recognize that he is intelligent and charming, but believe that he is of dubious integrity and without the qualities required for leadership and respect in the Arab world, or the strength to lead either a revolution or a new government. A prominent exception to this pattern is James Woolsey, who was the director of the CIA part of the time it was helping the INC, and does not share these negative views.

But first, the undisputed facts. Chalabi is from one of the old powerful and wealthy Baghdadi families which were forced into exile when the Baath Party seized power in 1958. He studied at MIT and then earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1969. Rejecting opportunities at American universities, he returned to the Arab world to teach mathematics at the American University in Beirut, where he met his wife, the daughter of one of the signers of the Lebanese declaration of independence.

Chalabi is a modern man of the West, who founded a successful software company in London and who understands democracy deep in his bones. What makes him truly exceptional is that he also continues to be deeply a man of the East, with the sensibilities and loyalties of his ancient Baghdad Arab and Muslim roots. Because of the family connections that still count for so much in the Middle East, he is comfortable negotiating with Sunni tribal sheikhs and Shia ayatollahs, familiar with the patterns of relationships that go back generations and form the structure of Iraqi and Arab politics.

In 1978 he opened the Petra bank in Amman, Jordan, in which he invested much of his capital and which was very successful until it was seized by the Jordanian government in 1989. The State Department and the CIA often say Chalabi's bank was seized because he had improperly diverted assets, and note the Jordanian government claim that Chalabi was wanted for questioning and that the bank failed some time after it was seized.

On closer examination, however, the story of Chalabi's supposed Jordanian scandal does not hold water. Those familiar with the facts say the bank was seized because Chalabi had been using its international connections to obstruct Iraq's efforts to finance its war with Iran. As a result, Saddam put pressure on Jordan's King Hussein to close the bank. This view is consistent with the official report of the Jordanian officer assigned to seize the bank, the fact that much of the money lost was Chalabi's own, that it was Crown Prince Hassan who protected Chalabi by personally driving him to the border when the bank was seized, that King Hussein held four friendly public meetings with Chalabi (the last in 1998), and that the king subsequently worked to restore Chalabi's position in Jordan.

It is likely that the best-informed people at the State Department and CIA know better, and yet find it useful not to debunk the anti-Chalabi story. We must look elsewhere, then, to discern the real reason for the bureaucratic antipathy to Chalabi.

After the Gulf War the CIA was trying to arrange a coup against Saddam by Iraqi generals in Saddam's inner circle. They believed that such a coup would become more likely if there were a small domestic political opposition movement which might be a reason or an excuse for the generals to remove Saddam. The CIA had already created an opposition organization called the Wifaq that they controlled and which was composed of former Iraqi military officers and former Baathist Party leaders. They recognized, however, that the Wifaq lacked political credibility and so they offered to help Chalabi create a new organization called the "Iraqi National Congress." The agency thought Chalabi would create a small and tame propaganda organization that would not cause too much trouble, but Chalabi created a genuinely representative Iraqi political organization that was independent and that decided it wanted to fight to overthrow both Saddam and his whole regime.

With support from the CIA and more than $10 million of his own and his family's money, Chalabi's INC created an open political opposition movement in northern Iraq from 1993-1996, operating newspapers, radio stations, and a lively political process involving Iraqis from all parts of the country. It also created a small military force that succeeded — with help from one of the Kurdish militias — in attacking and destroying two divisions of the Iraqi army.

Despite later loose charges to the contrary, the money received by the INC from the U.S. was well-accounted for and spent with extraordinary efficiency, greatly impressing many Congressional visitors who came to see for themselves, and making some of the Americans brought by the CIA to work with the INC among the most loyal of Chalabi's supporters to this day.

It is a mark of Chalabi's character that he has gained such a large band of volunteer advisers and supporters not only among Iraqis but also in England and the US. And despite being as fractious a group as any set of exile political figures, and quite diverse, the Iraqis who have joined the INC have continued to keep Chalabi as their clear leader despite the year-long effort of the State Department to find an alternative under the cover of "broadening and unifying the opposition."

Chalabi's admirers today also include leading academic experts on the Middle East who have known him well for many years, such as Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese Arab who is the author of the much-admired book The Dream Palace of the Arabs, and Bernard Lewis, probably the premier scholar of Islam in the world. A number of U.S. senators have also come to know him, including Joseph Lieberman and Trent Lott.

Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz all know from their personal contact with Chalabi — and their own checks of his background — that the State/CIA view of him as a small-time exile opportunist of shady character is wrong. They believe, on the contrary, that Chalabi is a man who has the character, vision, and strength needed to become an outstanding leader who can help move the Arab world away from the path of anti-American and backward-looking tyranny and toward a path of struggle toward modernity and democracy. If their assessment of him is sound, Chalabi could be the key figure in the success of President George W. Bush's new policy against terrorism, tyranny and threats of biological and nuclear war.

Differences of emphasis and nuance in the judgment about key facts and personalities are natural, but the gap in understanding between State and CIA on one side and Chalabi's admirers on the other is impossibly wide.

One side or the other must have the facts wrong. And the question of which group is correct about Chalabi is crucial for U.S. policy. Bush should do whatever he needs to do to decide who is right and to make a policy decision about whether the U.S. is going to support Chalabi. We cannot afford to take the chance of sacrificing such a decisively valuable potential partner out of reluctance to come to grips with an uncertainty, especially one that seems to be the product of bureaucratic enmities and Saudi fears of what would happen if a great Arab democrat came to power nearby.

— Max Singer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.

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