The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementa- tion. Getting in Too Deep with Chalabi In the minds of the top officials of the Department of Defense during the run-up to the war, Iraq by the end of [2003] would have enough oil flowing to help pay for the country’s reconstruction, a constitution nearly written and set for ratification and, perhaps most important, a popular new leader who shared America’s vision not only for Iraq’s future but also for the Middle East’s. Ahmad Chalabi may on the face of it seem an odd fig- ure to count on to unify and lead a fractious postwar nation that had endured decades of tyrannical rule. His background is in mathematics and banking, he is a secu- lar Shiite Muslim, and he had not been in Baghdad since the late 1950s. But in the early 1990s he became close to Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War, he founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups in exile. In the mid-1990s, Chalabi attended conferences on a post- Hussein Iraq organized by Perle and sponsored by the American Enter- prise Institute. There he met a group of neoconservative and con- servative intellectuals who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who later formed the core group that would persuade President George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq. … In the mid-1990s Chalabi fell out of favor with the CIA and the State Department, which questioned his popular support in Iraq and accused him of misappropri- ating American government funds earmarked for armed resistance by Iraqi exile groups against Saddam Hussein. He remained close with Perle and Wolfowitz, however, as well as with other neoconservative figures in Washington, including Douglas Feith, a former aide to Perle. … Chalabi lobbied senators and congressmen to support action against Saddam Hussein, and a coalition of neo- conservatives, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, sent a letter to President Clinton calling for a tougher Iraq policy. Together they succeeded in persuading the Republican-controlled Congress in 1998 to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law by President Clinton, a piece of legislation that made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. After George W. Bush assumed the presidency, Chalabi’s Washington allies were appointed to senior positions in the defense establishment. … (Wolfowitz, Perle and Chalabi all refused or did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.) … Planning began not only for the war itself but also for its aftermath, and various government departments and agencies initiated projects and study groups to consider the questions of postwar Iraq. … Chief among these agencies was the so-called Office of Special Plans, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, reporting to Douglas Feith in the Pentagon. It was given such a vague name, by Feith’s own admission, because the administra- tion did not want to have it widely known that there was a special unit in the Pentagon doing its own assessments F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 The Iraqi National Congress became not simply an Iraqi exile group of which Chalabi was a leader, but a kind of government-in-waiting with Chalabi at its head. David Rieff is an American writer and policy analyst. His early work concerned Third World immigration to the United States. More recently, he has covered wars and humanitarian emergencies in the Balkans, Central Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus. He is the author of six books, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times , The Atlantic Monthly , Los Angeles Times , and Foreign Affairs. He is a contributing editor to New Republic (Washington), Los Angeles Times Book Review , and Letras Libres (Mexico City). The article excerpted here was originally published in The New York Times Magazine on Nov. 2, 2003, copyright 2003, David Rieff. Reprinted by permission.