To the Bay of Goats, via the Panama Canal

To the Bay of Goats, via the Panama Canal

07/19/03: (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) The president is a first-term Republican who believes in projecting U.S. power, a scion of privilege who fancies himself a rancher. His advisers bring him a brilliant foreign national who promises to deliver a new government in a country where the United States badly wants a new government.

With the president's tacit approval, the foreign operative goes to work. The president sends the U.S. military to help. In short order, the old government is ousted, a new one is put in place and they all live happily ever after.

That was Panama, 1903. With the exception of the happily-ever-after-part, the same scenario is being played out in Iraq, 2003.

In 1903, the president was Theodore Roosevelt. The brilliant foreign national was Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, a bantam-size French engineer who stood to make millions if the United States bought out the French firm that had failed to complete the Panama Canal. The trouble was that Panama then belonged to Colombia, and Colombia wanted no part of the deal.

Bunau-Varilla delivered a revolution. Roosevelt delivered the USS Nashville to enforce it. Bunau-Varilla had himself named Minister Plenipotentiary to Washington and quickly sold the Canal Zone to the United States for $10 million and $250,000 a year in rent.

In late 2001, President George W. Bush read "Theodore Rex," the second volume of Edmund Morris' Roosevelt trilogy. According to news accounts, the president touted it widely, telling one interviewer that TR was the president he modeled himself after.

As it happens, at the same time Bush was reading Morris' book, some of own advisers had fallen under the spell of another foreign national, Ahmad Chalabi of Iraq.

Chalabi's history has been well-documented. He was 13 in 1958 when his family, Shiite Muslims and members of the Iraqi elite, fled to the west after a revolution overthrew the monarchy. Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he received a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago (his doctoral thesis was on the theory of knots) under Albert Wohlstetter, one of the original neoconservative theorists.

Through Wohlstetter, Chalabi was introduced to powerful neocons in and out of government. By then he was a powerful man in his own right as head of the Petra Bank of Jordan. In 1989, the bank collapsed spectacularly, and Chalabi fled to London with nothing but $70 million in his pockets.

There, he formed a government in exile for expatriates called the Iraqi National Congress. For a while, he did a lot of business with the CIA, but fell out of favor in 1996 when an INC offensive in Northern Iraq collapsed. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of the U.S. Central Command, derided the INC as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London" whose war plan "could turn the Bay of Pigs into the Bay of Goats."

But Chalabi's powerful neoconservative friends in the Bush administration were undaunted. In the months following Sept. 11, 2001, as Bush read "Theodore Rex," Chalabi and his supporters started banging the drums for taking out Saddam Hussein.

Installing Chalabi as president could transform the Middle East, they argued, not to mention the world's economy. Chalabi promised American oil companies first dibs on Iraq's oil reserves. Saudi Arabia might quickly fall in line, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would be cut off at the knees. Arab states would find themselves sandwiched between staunch American allies in Israel and Iraq. Terrorists would tremble.

It would have been beautiful, except for one thing: Unlike Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, Chalabi couldn't deliver. He was wrong about Iraqis welcoming American troops, wrong about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, wrong about his own popularity. ("Ahmad the Thief," some call him.)

If this is the "darn good" intelligence Bush says he gets, imagine what "darn bad" looks like.

Chalabi did get himself appointed as one of the 25 members of the Iraqi governing council, so maybe he still has a chance. And maybe those weapons of mass destruction will still turn up. Otherwise, George W. Bush's exercise in big-stick diplomacy could still turn into the Bay of Goats.

Copyright: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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