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Six Questions for Aram Roston
Author of ‘The Man Who Pushed America to War’
By Scott Horton
This week we mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion
of Iraq to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. The perfect book
for the week is NBC reporter Aram Roston’s deep probe into the
life of Ahmad Chalabi and the role he played in making the case
for an invasion of Iraq and in directing the early stages of the
occupation, which by consensus is now viewed as disastrous.
Roston has worked at NY1 News as a police reporter, as a
correspondent at CNN, and most recently has been a producer for
the investigative unit at the NBC Nightly News, where his work
has been honored with two Emmys. He has published investigative
stories in a number of major magazines.
19/03/08 "Harpers"
-- - 1. It’s common to see Chalabi linked closely to the
Neocons who played key roles in the Bush Administration’s
national security and defense establishment, but you make clear
that his key ties with the Republicans lie elsewhere. You write:
“One of his key backers has been John McCain, who was one
of the first patrons of Chalabi’s grand-sounding
International Committee for a Free Iraq when it was founded
in 1991. McCain was Chalabi’s favored candidate in the 2000
election since Chalabi knew that he would be able to free up
the $97 million in military aid plus millions pushed through
in Congress and earmarked for Chalabi’s exile group, the
Iraqi National Congress, but held up by the Clinton State
Department.”
Do Chalabi’s relations with John McCain continue? Would
you expect him to wield influence in a McCain administration?
I really don’t know where McCain and Chalabi stand these
days, or in the future.
Right now, in spite of everything that has happened, Chalabi
is making something of a comeback in the current Iraqi
government. It is no surprise to anyone familiar with his
persistence and his gifts for survival. It’s also no surprise
because even his detractors say he’s a competent and vigorous
organizer, even if they suspect his motives.
It is a bit of a surprise, perhaps, that Chalabi deals so
closely with American military and civilian officials. It was
just September 2006 when the majority of the Senate Intelligence
Committee concluded Chalabi’s organization provided “false
information” to the US in an attempt “to influence United States
policy on Iraq” before the war.
As for McCain’s support for Chalabi, no doubt it was strong
before the war. And indeed, that’s why, in the 2000 presidential
primary, Chalabi’s people initially rooted for McCain. But as I
pointed out in the book, too, if Al Gore had won in the 2000
election, Chalabi’s people believed they would have had a very
strong supporter right in the White House too: Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman’s advocacy for Chalabi was perhaps just as strong as
McCain’s. Or it was close anyway! It’s almost as if in the
election that came before preceded the invasion of Iraq, Chalabi
couldn’t lose.
2. You unfold Chalabi’s checkered history as a
businessman, and particularly his central role in a failed
banking operation in Jordan. You track down Chalabi’s role in
the Jordanian bank, checking Chalabi’s claims about it against
the reports of Jordanian authorities, which make Chalabi out to
be a confidence artist. It’s amazing that someone who has been
involved in financial services fraud can talk his way out of it
and have the charges dismissed by so many seemingly
sophisticated players—particularly by the intelligence community
and the media. Tell us how you think Chalabi pulled this off?
It is a bit of a mystery really, isn’t it? Basically,
Chalabi’s business background was one of the few things that
could have been used to weigh his ability and his character, and
people chose not to look too closely at it.
His explanation of his business career and the failure of his
bank, and his criminal conviction, has been that it was a fairly
extensive conspiracy by Saddam Hussein in collusion with the
government of Jordan. He says his Jordanian bank (Petra Bank)
was functionally sound when it was taken over by the Jordanians,
he says. He says he had to flee not to escape justice, but to
evade being handed over to Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq.
And when he was convicted, it was in absentia, (because he would
not return) and by a military court, which he maintains made it
unfair.
Most of his American admirers believe his story and they take
his explanation at face value. One can easily see how the papers
described it. As early as 1991, a New York Times
columnist described Chalabi as “an international banker who fled
Jordan for London after learning that King Hussein [of Jordan]
was preparing to turn him over to the Iraq police.” People were
quite willing to accept Chalabi’s story, and it really was no
easy task to get hold of the audits and investigations and
records that would have cast doubt on his story.
Since then, his supporters in the press and in think tanks
and in the government just repeated what he’d said. Some are
quite angry at what they believe to have been the wrongs done to
an innocent man.
He never really tells them that his bank, Petra Bank, was
part of a chain of family banks that collapsed as well in
Switzerland and in Lebanon.
They easily just dismissed an audit that was quite damning in
1990 by the accounting firm of Arthur Anderson. They accepted
his explanation that the audit had been rigged. Some Chalabi
admirers told me they actually went to Jordanian government
insiders with access to royalty, who confirmed Chalabi’s story.
I heard that from at least three people, but they would never
say exactly how this worked.
And the issue of his business conduct matters to some of his
friends They refuse the idea that he may have been, say a bad
businessman, who then fell afoul of aggressive regulators, or
some explanation like that. It is all part of a package to some
of his most dedicated supporters.
If he was in fact involved in chicanery, they will not hear
of it.
And then there are others, who simply don’t care what
happened in Petra Bank. Their point is that, well, in that part
of the world, things happen.
3. Chalabi’s relationship with the media seems to have
been charmed from the start. You tie him with Steve Kroft at 60
Minutes, Flora Lewis at the New York Times, Peter Jennings at
ABC, David Hirst at the Guardian and a long list of others. Each
seems to have accepted Chalabi as a highly-reliable source. This
again raises questions about Chalabi’s background and his
ability to sell himself as an objective analyst, when in fact he
was a man on a mission. Did any of these reporters ever come to
think that they had been had by Chalabi? Did they ever attempt
to correct or supplement their Chalabi-based reporting?
There are some reporters who confronted their relationship
with Chalabi in a very serious and profound way. And others who
simply trudged on. And then there are those who are simply his
friends, who say that they believe that Chalabi never did lie to
them anyway. They may be right too.
One journalist I describe at length in the book, who
certainly believes he was lied to by Chalabi, is David Rose, who
met Chalabi after 9/11 and quickly became one of the journalists
to spread the INC’s stories. He became a powerful, if naïve,
ally. The book describes how Rose, a very sincere and talented
journalist, now says he was charmed by Chalabi, manipulated by
him, and “used” by him.
Rose believes that the INC researched him to learn more about
him, to flatter him and play to his vanity. After a story or
two, he became convinced that Chalabi and his associates were
incredible sources. He wrote various stories that firmly linked
Saddam Hussein to the attacks of 911, to al Qaeda, and to
weapons of mass destruction programs.
Rose’ stories had tremendous public relations impact,
apparently linking Saddam to immense threats against the West,
and seeming to back the call for war.
And after the war started, he had an incredible crisis of
conscience once he realized how wrong he was, and tried to
investigate his own reporting. I honestly found his story a
harrowing tale for a journalist.
One thing that he, and other journalists did not ever realize
or report at the time was that all the false information given
to them by Chalabi’s INC was basically paid for by the United
States State Department, which was unwillingly funding an INC
“intelligence” program.
4. In your recounting, Chalabi also develops a key
relationship with Congressional staffers that facilitates his
rise. In particular you talk about Danielle Pletka and her
husband Steven Rademaker, key staffers in the Congressional
foreign policy apparatus, who seem almost to have been able to
run their own independent foreign policy and to have advanced
Chalabi tremendously. Explain how you think this happened, and
how Congressional staffers were able to help Chalabi achieve his
objectives?
Well, as the former Democratic Senate staffer Peter
Galbraith, a friend of Chalabi, says in the book, Chalabi
understood that to get what he wanted from Capitol Hill, he
needed to befriend not just legislators, but their staffers.
Most good lobbyists know this. And Chalabi was quite good at
befriending people. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that they ran
their own independent foreign policy. Certainly they helped push
the US in a direction that differed from the Clinton policy, and
often saw foreign policy partly in political terms, and as a
tool to use against Clinton. But it would be wrong to imply they
did not believe, ideologically, in what they were doing.
Pletka saw Iraq as a key issue, and she told me that she
believed it was a case where the CIA and State Department, which
she is not fond of institutionally, were simply coddling a
dictator. She says she believes that the State Department simply
likes Middle Eastern dictators.
She clearly liked Chalabi and his message: which was that he
and his little group could coalesce into a strong force against
Saddam.
Her husband, Steve Rademaker, who was a staffer in the House
Internation Affairs Committee had a slightly different
ideological reason for supporting Chalabi. (It was interesting,
as I researched this book, to learn how people could support
Chalabi for so many different reasons, sometimes contradictory
ones.)
Rademaker had worked with the contras (as a lawyer in the
State Department) and believed that the old “Reagan doctrine” of
using small indigenous armies and political groups to fight
communism was a good one. He meant the wars fought during
Reagan’s time: the Contras in Nicaragua, the mujahadeen in
Afghanistan against the Russians, or Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA,
against the communists in Angola.
Rademaker thought that old anti communist strategy of Reagan
and long dead CIA director William Casey could be pivoted, or
adapted, in this case to target Saddam Hussein. So Rademaker saw
Chalabi as potentially a kind of Adolfo Calero/Jonas Savimbi
figure.
Some other republicans saw Chalabi as just a useful figure
they could use to basically bash Clinton. Some were clearly
inspired by him.
But it is a mistake to see him only as backed by Republicans.
He had some bipartisan support. Not just Joe Lieberman, but even
then Senator Bob Kerrey supported the Iraqi Liberation Act,
which greatly benefited Chalabi, as a way to move against
Saddam.
5. The Central Intelligence Agency, you write, fueled
Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress with millions, and enabled
Chalabi personally to continue in the lifestyle of a wealthy
businessman—which in fact he was not. But most importantly, the
CIA appears to have pushed Chalabi forward as a credible figure
and to have suppressed, or perhaps not even to have known, about
the dark chapters in his past that undermined his credibility.
Wasn’t this an intelligence failure by the CIA? Has there been
any attempt by the CIA to deduce some “lessons learned” from it?
There’s a term: blowback. I wonder if that could be applied
here. The point is that Chalabi’s “Iraqi National Congress”
which pushed and lobbied the US government so hard for war in
2001 and 2002 was a reincarnation of a group that the CIA had
actually created in 1992 and then abandoned after it lost
control.
I quote one former officer describing how Chalabi’s INC,
which was created by the agency, “morphed and morphed and
morphed. We cocked this up,” he said. “The agency really made a
mess of this whole INC stuff.”
In the early 1990s, the CIA invented and paid for the Iraqi
National Congress with US taxpayer money, built up Chalabi as
its leader and let him spend that money, and then in the mid
1990s, it cut him off. By then, he used the credibility and the
organization they helped him found, and heading to Washington DC
to lobby for money overtly, bypassing the CIA completely. By
then he was basically was at war with them. And that animosity
proved useful because they had bureaucratic enemies in DC.
6. The consensus of most students of the U.S. misadventure
in Iraq is that the first six to eight months of U.S. management
on the ground consisted of a series of almost unimaginably
stupid misjudgments on critical issues. Certainly the single
most tragic misassessment was the decision to turn to
“de-Baathification” by shutting down the Iraqi Army and other
vital state structures. You put Ahmad Chalabi right at the
decision-point, pushing aggressively for the decision that was
taken and effectively overriding career U.S. intelligence,
foreign affairs and military personnel. Is it really credible to
think that a non-American confidence artist could have wielded
such critical influence at such a vital juncture? If so, what
does that tell you about the management of the occupation in
Iraq in its early phase?
I don’t know that you can blame Chalabi for all the
post-invasion blunders. In fact you probably can’t. One can say
that the infighting over him was responsible for a lot if it
though.
The whole thing at the beginning of the war was that the
administration really did not make a decision. Remember, the
thinking at the time was kind of divided between two camps. On
the one side were the Chalabi loyalists in the US administration
who believed that simply installing Chalabi and an “interim
government” would solve everything. On the other side, well,
there was an effort to come up with a long-term plan.
One thing that struck me as I researched the book was that it
seemed no decisions were ever made. It was a debate that
continued: an “exile” government versus some other form of
government. It got confusing, and Chalabi’s role was not always
simple. Certainly General Jay Garner had planned to put in at
least a government nominally run by Iraqis, but he was also no
fan of Chalabi. But he was then replaced by Ambassador Paul
Bremer, and there was a state of immense confusion.
Chalabi did get his de-Baathification, under Bremer, but he
did not get much else. Soon Bremer and Chalabi were clashing.
In fact one can say that Chalabi did always argue that a long
term “occupation” government such as the one that was installed
was bad mistake. It may have been self serving but he did say it
and he was not the only one.
Buy a copy of ‘The Man Who Pushed America to War’ at your
local bookseller, or purchase a copy online
here.
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