CUTTING CHALABI LOOSE
(from the Washington Post)
BAGHDAD, May 20 -- U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police on Thursday raided the home of Ahmad Chalabi, a Governing Council member who was once the Pentagon's pick to run post-war Iraq, and two office buildings used by his Iraqi National Congress.
U.S. troops detained three guards and seized computers, dozens of rifles, and files from the offices of the INC, a coalition of parties headed by Chalabi that opposed Saddam Hussein from exile.
Wow, when the Pentagon cuts someone loose, they really cut them loose. I'm very suspicious, though, about the speed at which Chalabi seems to have gone from being the neocons' Number One Guy to just another Iraqi who gets his door kicked in.
Chalabi was, for a long time, the Bush Gang's pick to run Iraq after Saddam. They flew him in to southern Iraq not long after the fighting started and set him up with his own private army to hunt Ba'athists in an attempt to help him cultivate legitimacy among Iraqis, which didn't happen.
When I first saw this story, I thought it might be possible that the U.S. was trying help bolster Chalabi's legitimacy by taking this new stance toward him. Josh Marshall doesn't think too much of this idea, with good reason:
Something quite that orchestrated would, I suspect, be far too difficult to pull-off. And are we dealing here with smooth operators? Answers itself, doesn't it?
One other point: You only have to look next door to see what happens to American puppets after they have their fallings-out with the Americans. Clue: They don't get embraced by the other side. In fact, that guy from nextdoor was lucky to get out of the country in one piece.
The first point is the strongest argument against the reverse-psychology theory: the Bush Gang is simply too inept to pull something like this off. The second argument is somewhat less strong, as the situation in Iraq right now is rather different from 1979 Iran. There is no single party or leader who commands the allegiance of the Iraqi people as Khomeini did in Iran, it's a much more fluid situation in Iraq, and the make-up of the future Iraqi government is still very much unknown. It's not entirely inconceivable that Chalabi could still cobble together something resembling credibility in the eyes of Iraqis.
Rather than the reverse-psychology model, it's more likely that Chalabi himself has taken a more adversarial stance against the U.S. in an attempt to cultivate that legitimacy for himself, to get himself, at the very least, a place at the table in the new government. And he's made his former Pentagon sponsors very angry in doing this, and they don't like being made to look like fools. They do that quite well enough by themselves, thank you very much.
(Juan Cole has a good post on this, too.)
The underlying reality to all this is A) the only way to avoid having Iraq implode into a civil war is to find a leader (or group of leaders) with enough credibility to get people talking rather than shooting, and B) at this point, it seems the best way for such a leader (or group of leaders) to establish that credibility is for them to stand up to, or be perceived as having stood up to, the U.S.
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