The Wall Street Journal is also nonplussed at the U.S. attack on Chalabi. They say that the elements within the U.S. government that didn’t want to do anything about Hussein have always had a vendetta against Chalabi for calling for Hussein’s ouster.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005112

Personally, I don’t know enough about Chalabi to have a definitive opinion, since everything I’ve heard about him comes either from his friends or his shadowy enemies in the U.S. government. But the fact is that Chalabi actually organized and led the first major Iraqi organization to oppose the rule of Hussein. He’s a pro-Western, secular Shi’ite who has worked alongside Kurds and other Iraqis, who trained a small armed force, and so on. Wasn’t such a man a logical choice to play a major role in the forming of a new government? Who on the scene would be a better choice?

Chalabi apparently has a bunch of Iraqi intelligence files, some of which he claims could be very damaging to the King of Jordan, and others which apparently reveal details on the oil-for-food scandal. It is conceivable that he might also have some files that would be damaging to the US. Obviously, if this is true and if Chalabi is wiling to use blackmail, he would be much more independent of US control and would be much freer to pursue his own interests, rather than having to kowtow to our will because any power he has, he has only through our sufferance.
I don’t know whether Chalabi would use blackmail or not, but if he would it would be a threat to the US having ultimate control over Iraqi decisions, and it is possible that some elements in the government want to nip that possibility in the bud. Conversely, if Chalabi has damaing information, it is possible that some people just want to take him down to make certain that the information does not get out.
This is not to say that Chalabi would use blackmail, but many people would probably rather that he not have that option.

http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/004613.html
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3068557

Chalabi’s had those files since the fall of Baghdad last spring. Different versions of how he got them are starting to surface. Whether they were given to him or he took them himself and was permitted to keep them is no longer clear. Either way, it doesn’t explain why they’re moving on him now.

Michael Jose writes:

“I don’t know whether Chalabi would use blackmail or not, but if he would it would be a threat to the US having ultimate control over Iraqi decisions”

US for sure doesn’t have ultimate control over Iraq when we have 135000 troops there. It is a time to plan for a real possibility that a future legit Iraq’s goverment will be mildly hostile to USA, Kurds probably exempted.

Giving that we are facing a (political, media induced) defeat, why waste time and resources on settling score with Chalabi. Even if he did something mildly corrupt.

I am not one for conspiracy theories, but the timing of the seizure of Chalabi’s residence is suspect. It perhaps helps take some of the heat off the Pentagon/military.

My gut feeling is Rumsfeld is finished. Though he warned us about more photos and videos of bad things our soldiers did at the prisons, that warning only made my impression of him more negative—because, he can only be either 1) a grossly incompetent leader by allowing such behavior to go on or 2) he authorized the mistreatment/abuse humself. He’s a goner either way, in my humble opinion.

Of course, canning Rumsfeld won’t solve the problem. There is obvisouly much denial and cya’s going on in among our military brass. Some lower echelon heads have got to roll, so that justice can be done and we can “get on with the occupation” (I am being facecious, of course).

Jim Hoagland is far superior to his ludicrous counterparts at NYT and LAT. In most cases he appears to push no agenda of his own, almost uniquely among establishment pundits.

Hoagland has an outline for salvaging Iraq affair.
Major points:

“they (Americans) learn from their mistakes quickly and adjust decisively. That point is said to have been made by Nazi Germany’s greatest general, Erwin Rommel, after he watched U.S. troops turn the fortunes of World War II in North Africa.

The Bush administration stretches the thesis attributed to the Desert Fox to the breaking point with its failure to adjust to mistakes and miscalculations in Iraq. It has been unable to stabilize the position of strategic strength it established a year ago by removing Saddam Hussein’s hated regime.”

“The president must now devise a worst-case scenario in Iraq, rather than focusing on what-might-have-beens.”

“If the only way to achieve this is to accept a temporary, de facto partition of Iraq into three zones of autonomy with differing security responsibilities, so be it.

The United States should not set the partition of Iraq as a formal policy goal. But neither should it go back, even covertly, to supporting territorial integrity enforced by state terrorism wielded by a Sunni strongman.”

“The administration’s original case for invading and occupying Iraq has been dismantled almost piece by piece.”

Read the whole thing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41363-2004May19.html

“The United States should not set the partition of Iraq as a formal policy goal. But neither should it go back, even covertly, to supporting territorial integrity enforced by state terrorism wielded by a Sunni strongman.”

Amen. As I asked before, why have so many jumped to the conclusion that the only viable alternative to Western-style democracy is a “strongman” ? Neither is a good choice, so we better open the discussion to all other possibilities.

Of course, as Mr. Auster has long pointed out, there never was a national strategic discussion about Iraq. Perhaps it is not too late. I predict that such a discussion cannot be held before the November elections, because Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld are in damage control/re-election mode, wherein no discussion may be held that implies that any mistakes have ever been made.

Clark Coleman writes:

“As I asked before, why have so many jumped to the conclusion that the only viable alternative to Western-style democracy is a “strongman” ? Neither is a good choice, so we better open the discussion to all other possibilities.”

I for one, always seen as most doable scenario a combination of semi-sane strongman (-men) and cantonal system ala Swiss. Swiss Federation exists from 13th Century if memory serves. I don’t think Iraqis reached level of 13th Century Swiss but they should not be too far behind either.

The Hoagland column linked by Mik was published just the day before the Hoagland column I posted, so he’s been unusually agitated by events in Iraq. In the earlier column I find Hoagland, as I usually find him, difficult to follow. He speaks a kind of insider shorthand and doesn’t make clear the logic of his own arguments. He strongly criticizes the present U.S. plan to hand over formal sovereignty to a panel chosen by the UN leading to elections in six months. But then he warns against letting a Sunni strongman take over Iraq again at the expense of the Kurds and the Shi’ites. But why should popular elections lead to dominance by the Sunnis, who are only 20 percent of the country? Then at the end he throws in the point that the original purpose of our invasion of Iraq has been discredited by the failure to find WMDs. But what does that have to do with the rest of the article?

Thus I find no logical coherence here, as is typical of the whole Iraq debate itself over the last year or two.

Mr. Auster writes:

“…he warns against letting a Sunni strongman take over Iraq again at the expense of the Kurds and the Shi’ites. But why should popular elections lead to dominance by the Sunnis, who are only 20 percent of the country? Then at the end he throws in the point that the original purpose of our invasion of Iraq has been discredited by the failure to find WMDs.”

Perhaps Hoagland doesn’t like both scenarios, UN supervised transfer AND Sunni strongman. I also don’t like both those scenarious. Like Hoagland I like Cantonal federation with de-facto independence for Kurds with a pro-forma central goverment for Iraq with fewer powers than EU.

His conclusion baffles me as well. Perhaps as WaPo’s employee he has to throw a PC bone.

David Levin is right. Our government stands as a collection of outwitted clowns. Either they were completely taken in by Chalabi, who was not just a self-seeker or crook but and out-and-out enemy, or they have been taken to the cleaners by Iranian “plants.” Either way, something has gone very wrong.

US strategy in Iraq should not get bogged down by insisting on one form of government or another. The bottom-line rationale for going into Iraq in the first place has to be the removal of a regime which supported terrorists threatening the US.

Whether or not you agree that Saddam’s regime was guilty of that, it has been removed and now it is time to leave. Let the Iraqis form whatever government, in whatever style, they choose. If they want to revert to arrangements that divide the territory along tribal or religious lines, let them. Where does it say Iraq has to be one nation? As long as they stay out of the terrorism game, it shouldn’t matter to us.

But let them know that if they pull that stuff again, we’ll be back.

“I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building. I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win war.”

—George W. Bush, October 11, 2000

Charlie’s above (Bush) quote is so prophetic. That should be posted in every newspaper and on every chat site.

Of course, that is precisely what Bill Clinton and Madeline Halfbright did in Bosnia and Haiti—nation building—so GWB has not been “alone” in this regard. We on the right, however, must not cast stones too forcefully when our own great leader, Ronald Reagan, did something similar in Grenada (though we did not keep thousands of our troops there as we have done in Bosnia)—and now GWB.

As many here have remarked in the past, Bush, despite the campaign rhetoric that was designed to gin up conservative support, has continued the liberal policies of his predecessor. Nation building is simply another example what what has become a substantial list.

A few thoughts about Ahmad Chalabi just occurred to me:
(1) According to Michael Ledeen, the CIA hates Chalabi because he correctly predicted the failure of their attempts at a coup rather than a total revolution in Iraq.
My thought: Is it possible that he helped to make those coups fail because it would not have served his interests (or Iran’s, if you believe that he is an Iranian agent) to see Saddam replaced by a different Baathist and have the US ease its pressure on Iraq.

2) Also according to Mr. Ledeen, it makes no sense that an Iranian, upon learning from Chalabi that our code had been broken, would inform Iran in that same code that it had been broken, and would name Chalabi as the informer. This implies to Mr. Ledeen that the CIA is lying or that the message was Iranian disinformation to discrecit our illustrious ally Chalabi.
My thought: Is it possible that someone else, say a CIA spy, found out about Chalabi and informed the CIA, but telling the real story of how they found out would compromise this agent, so they made up another one? Or that the person who informed the Iranians that Chalabi had told him that we had broken the code might have been working for the CIA and deliberately did it this way so that we would intercept the message and discover Chalabi’s faithlessness?

In response to Mr. Jose’s post of 11:03 AM: A nearly infinite variety of scenarios are possible. The likelihood that any of us will ever learn the truth is close to zero. My conclusion is that I will not be taking sides in this dispute, as I would be doing so ignorantly.

I caution Mr. Jose against the opposite course. His modus operandi with respect to Chalabi has been to believe everything bad that is written about him, because Ledeen and some other neocons supported Chalabi. Basing one’s decisions on guilt by association is fraught with potential error.