Joshua Muravchik: Neocon Corner

Confessing error is never easy, especially when under attack. We neoconservatives were proven right about every issue on which we took up cudgels against liberals and paleocons for 25 years, so when we finally were wrong on Iraq, we got pilloried. The particulars of our errors—whether it was the whole idea of invading Iraq or just aspects of its execution—will be sorted out for a long time, but one cardinal mistake was undoubtedly our infatuation with Ahmad Chalabi.

I met him around the time of the first Gulf war, and I gave him a copy of my recently-published book, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny. When I saw him next, maybe five years later, he said: “I read your book, but I don’t think your government has.” I was of course flattered and amused. And I was enchanted by this articulate man from that other-planet of Baathist Iraq who professed the very same democratic beliefs central to my worldview.

I wrote an article in Commentary advocating military aid to Chalabi’s insurgency, although I also said: “Those Iraqis who say they want to fight for democracy may not, in the end, prove to be true democrats, but there can be no real test of that proposition unless and until they come to power.”

Well, Chalabi has not come to power, but he has been close enough to it that the results are already clear—and he flunks with flying colors. Never mind all the controversy over bogus WMD reports from Iraqi sources that Chalabi may or may not have had much to do with. Let us just consider Chalabi’s acts since his return to Iraq after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

By all accounts it was Chalabi who put together the pan-Shiite slate that won Iraq’s first post-war election. This got the country’s aborning democracy off to a troubled beginning, emphasizing sectarian divisions that nearly led to a civil war.

When Chalabi’s own electoral standing proved next to nil, he forged an alliance with the most retrograde of the Shiite factions, led by Muqtada al-Sadr who was second only to al-Qaeda in Iraq for thuggery, internecine bloodshed, and efforts to defeat the democratic project.

Chalabi was also accused by U.S. officials in 2004 of passing American secrets to Iran. No clear evidence was made public, and since he was neither American nor in America, no charges were brought.

This week, Iraq held elections that will determine the composition of the Iraqi government as U.S. forces withdraw, meaning that the entire project of implanting democracy in that country rides on the outcome, including on perceptions that the process is fair and legitimate.

But an enormous shadow has been cast over that by the so-called De-Baathification Commission, controlled by Chalabi. It disqualified hundreds of candidates before the election and may even bar others after the fact. Never mind trying to figure out from here who truly was or was not a Baathist, or at what level. What is transparently clear is that no democracy can place the power to disqualify candidates in the hands of other candidates, and Chalabi and his underlings on the De-Baathification Commission were themselves running in this election. This is a travesty.

Last week, Chalabi took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to complain about U.S. pressures to reverse the disqualifications. “Recent attempts to interfere in Iraq’s constitutionally mandated elections are counterproductive and shortsighted,” he wrote. “All we ask is the opportunity to move forward on our own as we see fit.” Surely this deserves the Nobel Prize for chutzpah. This man who worked more than anyone to get the U.S. to spend thousands of lives to oust the Iraqi government so that he, himself, might bid for power, now indignantly tells us to butt out?

But there is worse. In an effort to change the subject from his election shenanigans, Chalabi floats the idea of “a regional alliance among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran that would be of benefit to the entire Middle East and a strong bastion against Islamic extremism.”

Say what? I heard Iran’s reactionary Majlis speaker, Ali Larijani, make a roughly similar proposal at a forum in Dubai once. An alliance of this kind is designed to push the United States from the region and pave the way for Iranian and/or Islamist hegemony. Who knows about the espionage charges, but the games Chalabi is playing are a threat both to Iraq’s prospects for democracy, as well as to America’s interests in the region.