WELCOME TO IWPR'S IRAQI CRISIS REPORT, No. 14, April 14, 2003

COMMENT: HIS OWN MAN Ahmad Chalabi: self-seeking agent of American
imperialism or genuine champion of freedom? By Julie Flint in Beirut.

COMMENT: A CENTURY OF ARAB DELUSION Iraq perfected a corrupted version of
Arab nationalism, but it was Arab intellectuals who created and then
abetted it. Can they ever change their spots? By Ali A. Allawi in London.

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COMMENT: HIS OWN MAN

Ahmad Chalabi: self-seeking agent of American imperialism or genuine
champion of freedom?

By Julie Flint in Beirut

In the middle of March, as opposition figures in northern Iraq were
arguing over who should sit on what committee in anticipation of a
provisional government, Ahmad Chalabi was quietly solving the Heine-Borel
theorem. The meeting over, he faxed his proof to his former professor at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also has a neat little
solution to the Pythagoras' theorem. Pythagoras' own proof covers two
pages; Chalabi's, four lines.

Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the most visible
of Iraq's exile leaders, will not be among the would-be post-Saddam
politicians meeting Gen. Jay Garner in the southern town of Nasiriya this
Tuesday, April 15, to discuss establishing an interim authority to help
run Iraq until a democratic government is elected. His many critics will
no doubt portray his decision to absent himself, and his claim that he
wants no political role in Iraq, as an attempt to distance himself from
Iraq's "liberators", a tactical move on his way to the top.

Chibli Mallat, who in 1991 helped Chalabi found the International
Committee for a Free Iraq, disagrees. He says Chalabi's "inclination" has
always been not to have an official position in the new Iraq.

"It was hard to convince Ahmad to appear with the delegation that made the
first high-level INC visit to Washington in August 1992," he said. "He did
not want to take a prominent position. In any case, he is absolutely right
to stay away from Nasiriya. This is no time for fig leaves: General Garner
has no business running Iraq. His office is for reconstruction and
humanitarian assistance. Politics is the business of Iraqis. Iraqis must
run Iraq now."

Chalabi's critics say his long struggle against Saddam's cruel regime
boils down to personal ambition. But many of those who know him well
believe that nothing could be further from the truth. As with his
mathematics, Chalabi believes that to every problem there is a solution -
and has been seeking democracy for Iraq single-mindedly, without regard
for his comfort or safety, for much of his life.

The INC he established more than a decade ago was the first opposition
group to unite a wide spectrum of Iraqi political and religious groups.
Despite this - or perhaps because of it - he has been vilified in the West
and in the Arab world as, respectively, a corrupt chancer and an
instrument of US-Israeli designs upon the Middle East.

At this point I have to come clean: Ahmad Chalabi is a friend, and has
been for more than 15 years. He is alternately exasperating and charming;
patient and impatient; dismissive and attentive. He is more widely read
than anyone I know. He doesn't suffer fools. He is seldom modest, always
late for dinner and has questionable taste in suits. Most importantly,
much of what is being said about him is simply wrong.

While Chalabi enjoys strong support from key figures in the Pentagon, the
Central Intelligence Agency and the US State Department have lobbied hard
against him, using the media to level a range of political and personal
accusations against him, including:

* "Convicted felon": Chalabi's Jordanian bank, Petra Bank, collapsed in
1989 amid allegations of financial impropriety and Chalabi was convicted
in absentia of embezzlement and fraud. At the time, the late King Hussein
was Saddam's closest Arab ally and Chalabi, based in Jordan, his most
creative Iraqi opponent. A few weeks before the bank was closed - oddly,
by military law - a major American auditing firm gave it a clean bill of
health. In the same year Chalabi was convicted, King Hussein paid him the
first of several secret visits and asked him what was the cause of his
anger towards an old friend. Chalabi replied: "Because you made me out to
be a thief and my family a family of thieves." He refused a royal pardon,
since pardon implies guilt.

The Wall Street Journal recently produced evidence that the State
Department has attempted to perpetuate this "bank robber" image by putting
pressure on government auditors to produce evidence that would enable it
to "shut down the INC". The auditors gave the INC a clean bill of health
and said it was "impossible" for them to comply with various State
Department demands.

* "A long-time exile with no real ties to Iraq." Chalabi, alone among
exile leaders, has fought against Saddam from Iraqi soil. In 1993 he left
the comforts of a home in London - a modest home, by Arab banker
standards - to be ambushed and almost killed in the liberated Kurdish area
of northern Iraq and to see his headquarters there blown up and colleagues
killed. His sources in the heart of the Iraqi regime consistently provided
important, and ultimately validated, inside information. Most high-level
defectors from the regime defected to him. He said defeating the Iraqi
army would be relatively easy, and he was right.

* "A tool of US 'neo-conservatives' with a pro-Israeli, anti-Arab agenda."
For years Chalabi sought Arab backing to remove Saddam and end his
atrocities. Saudi Arabia, typically, promised much, delivered nothing and
finally said: "Our leadership wants to help you. The condition is you
abandon democracy and human rights." So Chalabi looked outside the Arab
world - and found supporters in Vice President Dick Cheney, the Pentagon
and among some "neo-cons". He knows what this costs him in the Arab world,
but has been seeking to remove Saddam - not to win a popularity contest.

* "Has made visits to Israel". He has never visited Israel. Like many Arab
liberals, he has Jewish friends and would certainly prefer peace to war,
at the right time and in the right conditions.

* "He has no support on the Iraq street." No support has been permitted on
the Iraqi street, for anyone but Saddam, for 35 years. Most Iraqis know
only those who Saddam permitted them to know. In Nasiriya, Chalabi was
welcomed by a crowd of thousands. Hundreds of tribal chiefs, clerics and
others have been coming to see him in the crowded warehouse where he is
living without running water or toilets. Anyone wanting to run for public
office in the new Iraq will have to build a support base. Chalabi's
chances of getting that support were reduced the moment he hitched his
wagon to America's army, and he knew it.

* In supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq, he has shown no respect for
UN legitimacy. Chalabi would argue that the need would not have arisen had
the UN been respectful of its mission of freedom and democracy in Iraq;
had member states like France and Germany supported decisive action, in
line with long-standing UN resolutions, against one of the worst
dictatorships on earth.

* "A catspaw of Washington". A catspaw, however, who is loathed by the CIA
and the State Department. Not only because he has consistently pushed for
action rather than words - and action by Iraqis rather than, as now, by
Americans. But also because, as his friend, the American columnist Anthony
Lewis, says: "When you hear Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
maligning Chalabi, you hear the institutional voices of Saudi Arabia and
Egypt speaking through him." Many in the US administration would prefer to
see Saddam replaced by former Ba'athists, who would get along just fine
with their friends in Riyadh and Cairo.

It is here that Chalabi's problems will lie if he ever emerges, or wants
to emerge, as a successor to Saddam. He is a Shia Muslim, a majority in
Iraq but a minority in the wider Arab world. Even before the US-led war on
Iraq, Sunni-ruled Egypt refused to allow him to visit Egypt for a meeting
with President Hosni Mubarak. It is not his secular Shi'ism that most
scares Iraq's Sunni neighbours, however. It is his vision of a liberal,
democratic state that would be nothing like theirs.

"If I would put Ahmad's qualities on one side of a scale, and his defects
on the other side, I have no doubt the former will far outweigh the
latter," says Kamran Karadaghi, a respected independent Iraqi journalist
who knows Chalabi well. "True he lives on a different planet, but it is
the better one. Ahmad Chalabi towers among other opposition leaders when
it comes to supporting Kurdish rights. As a Kurd I say this: If the
Americans decide to enforce an Arab leader of their own choosing in
Baghdad, the Kurds will pray that it will be Ahmad."

On the eve of the war, Chalabi and a colleague, the writer Kanan Makiya,
succeeded almost single-handedly in obliging Washington to modify its
plans for the post-Saddam, thundering in the US press about the
"unworkable and unwise" concept of military governorship.

"It forces American officers to make difficult decisions about Iraqi
society and culture with very little knowledge," Chalabi wrote. "Will an
American colonel at the Ministry of Education decide on the role of Islam
in school curricula? The US does not need to handpick a successor to
Saddam, nor does it need to predetermine every single step in the
post-Saddam era. We expect the US to make a full commitment to accepting
the will of the Iraqi people and not fail us in our desire for justice."

Whether he asks for, or accepts, a direct political role, do not expect
Ahmad Chalabi to fall silent.

Julie Flint is Iraqi Crisis Report co-ordinating editor and a former IWPR
trustee.


COMMENT: A CENTURY OF ARAB DELUSION

Iraq perfected a corrupted version of Arab nationalism, but it was Arab
intellectuals who created and then abetted it. Can they ever change their
spots?

By Ali A. Allawi in London

Somewhere in the1920s, the Arab national idea, which had hitherto been a
reformist and even liberal notion allied to a moderate Islam, and
well-integrated into the socio-cultural map of the Middle East, took a
wrong turn. It began to develop definite racist overtones, hegemonistic
values, and an exclusivist and intolerant perspective on politics and
society.

The architect of this suicidal turn was that fastidious Ottoman
intellectual dandy, with his broken Arabic and a borrowed philosophy from
Bergson and German idealism, Sati' al-Husri. He put his theories into
practice by imposing them on an entire generation of Iraqis through his
control of the educational system and his cultivation of ever more extreme
ideologues and politicians who used his vulgarisation of Arab nationalism
as a control tool over an ethnically and religiously diverse people.

In the 1950s this sorry experiment in Iraq became the norm elsewhere in
the Middle East. One regime after another tottered and fell to Arab
nationalists of the al-Husri variety. In power, they metamorphosed into
the Arab Nationalist Movement, these exemplars of Arab "democracy" who
gave us the unlamented regime of South Yemen, the Nasserist apologists and
their apotheosis, the Ba'ath Party, in both its Iraqi and Syrian
varieties. Kurds and Berbers became mountain Arabs, Islam was a folk
identity, and there were no ethnic or religious minorities to clutter this
pristine vision of an indivisible Arab nation with an (undefined) historic
mission.

The Iraqi Ba'ath Party, riding high on massive oil wealth in the 1970s,
underpinned its vicious racist and sectarian policies by reference to
these absurd theories. Such was the power of these ideas that there was
not a peep from the Arab nationalists over the decades of Ba'athist rule
when Iraq was ethnically cleansed of its 500,000 Fayli Kurds; when the
majority Shia, always suspect in nationalist lore, were reduced to cannon
fodder in the regime's wars of aggression; when Kurds were forcibly
relocated, gassed and Arabised, all in the name of some homicidal fantasy
about the Arab nation and guarding its eastern gateways from the Persian
invader.

Saddam Hussein rode to power on a tank, but he was served by an army of
grovelling intellectuals who betrayed every principle of their trade. Noam
Chomsky wrote a classic article in the 1960s castigating America's
intellectuals for not rising to their responsibilities with regards to the
Vietnam War. Only Kenan Makiya amongst the Arab intelligentsia, to his
everlasting credit, dared to rise to this challenge in his moving book,
Cruelty and Silence.

The Arab intellectuals who cowardly theorised and justified the murderous
regime of the Ba'ath, and continued to view Saddam Hussein as a champion
of their cause on the grounds of a phantom Arab "solidarity", are directly
responsible for the tragedies that have befallen Iraq and its people.

Remnants of this thinking still persist, in spite of the catastrophes that
have afflicted the Middle East. Every one of the pet literary, political
and philosophical projects of these mostly untalented arbiters of the
intellectual scene in Arabic-speaking countries is now in ruins. They have
crashed against the harsh realities of an Arab decay caused mainly by the
grotesque ideas that these wreckers have forced on Arab society, in
alliance with the military and secret police thugs who still cling to
power.

The debacle in Iraq, if the satellite channels that pander to this
thinking are any guide, will not have any serious effect on the policies
and practices of these regimes. It is being met by denial and by the
reaffirmation of the old verities. Having spent two generations denouncing
Islam as reactionary, they are now trying to cling to it as a strategic
ally in their doomed effort to salvage some scrap of credibility. The Arab
regimes, led by Syria, are quaking in their shoes after the fall of
Ba'athism in Iraq, for that is what it really is, the abject and final
failure of an ideological system whose champions blithely presided over
one disaster after another.

Can a leopard change its spots? I doubt it, although what needs to be done
is as clear as daylight. Reform of decrepit state structures, economic
liberalisation, jettisoning of a spent ideology, dissolution of security
apparatuses, demilitarisation, intellectual and political freedoms,
openness and tolerance - in fact everything that the nationalist
ideologues abhor. That is why de-Ba'athification in Iraq is so important.
The cult of violence, aggression and hatred, which the Ba'ath has so
assiduously cultivated, must be uprooted from society and its scars have
to heal.

The legacy of Sati' al-Husri, realised by the Ba'ath and Saddam Hussein,
is the ruin of Iraq. It is the brutalisation of societies, the
pauperisation of nations, rampant theft and corruption, sectarian and
tribal divisiveness, and now, the cowardly cringing from a hyperpower
whose goals are uncertain but which has taken an intense dislike to these
regimes.

Where will this end? I cannot say for sure, but Ba'athism, Arab
nationalism, in fact any totalitarian thought system, cannot survive in
the Middle East anymore. They deserve to be junked in the scrap-yard of
failed systems. Good riddance, I say.

Ali A. Allawi is an Iraqi economist and investment banker in London who is
active in the Iraqi opposition.

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Copyright (c) 2003 The Institute for War & Peace Reporting

IRAQI CRISIS REPORT No. 14