Of Course He Lied….
By Did Ahmed Chalabi lie in order to press the United States to go into Iraq? This is a silly question; of course he lied, and of course he stole, and of course he talked to the Iranians, etc. etc. These, believe it or not, are not his true sins; there are many opponents of brutal, authoritarian regimes who will lie and steal and manipulate in order to overturn or harm the governments that they oppose. Yes, he helped con the United States into a war, but that’s hardly his problem; 4000 dead and a $12 billion/month in expenses is America’s responsibility, not his.
Chalabi’s real sin was ignorance. First, he hadn’t the faintest idea of the actual situation in Iraq. He depended on exiles for all of his information, and displayed no apparent interest in determining the likely effects of a US sponsored overthrow of the regime. He failed utterly to build a base of support sufficient to control Iraq, a problem that the United States noted very quickly. In short, this would-be revolutionary figured out a way to make the destruction work, but gave no attention to the creation; in this he’s not too terribly different from his American allies. Second, Chalabi gravely underestimated the ineptitude of the people that he was lying to. If you’re going to con someone, you have to make sure they have what you want, and it turns out that Chalabi’s marksallies didn’t have the goods. It was not in Chalabi’s interest to have Iraq turned into either a) an US imperial outpost, or b) a democracy; he wanted to be the Iraqi Attaturk, an enlightened despot who would rule with US assistance, but not at the beck and call of the Americans. But this was not a possible outcome; too many Americans actually believed the democracy rhetoric, and those who didn’t had no use for a puppet that had its own mind. Rather than using, Chalabi got used, and it didn’t take a genius to see what was going to happen.
The moral of the story is that while it’s easy to play morons like Richard Perle, it doesn’t get you very far in the end.