Bay Of Goats

Josh and Matt are teasing out the insider take on Chalabi so we don’t have to. They seem to agree that there probably isn’t anything new but rather that a power shift within the Bush administration that has caused the anti-Chalabi faction to flex its long abused muscles.

Matt Says:

So we have really two possibilities here. One is that some piece of evidence came to light that changed the mind of Chalabi’s backers inside the beltway. The other is that there was simply a shift in the correlation of forces inside the government — no one changes their mind about Chalabi, it’s just that the anti-Chalabi forces, formerly weak, became strong. Hence the new policy.

One good piece of evidence for scenario two is the behavior of the out-of-government friends of Ahmed — David Frum and the AEI crowd. If an influential Chalabi-backer on the inside (call him, “Ronald Dumsfeld”) had changed his mind, then you would think Dumsfeld would call his fellow-travelers in the media and make his case. That might not convince all — or even most — of the media Chalabistas, but it would surely convince some of them. Instead, all of the nongovernmental Chalabi-fans seem to still be Chalabi fans, indicating that all the anti-Chalabi stuff coming out of the government is coming from traditional anti-Chalabi sources.

That’s assuming that there are any sane Chalabi backers in the first place. I think most of them are as blind about him as they are about everything else, so I doubt that they would believe there was anything wrong with their boy even if they saw him french kissing the Ayatollah Khomeni. The ties go way back and undergird the entire neocon movement and its traditional concern with Israeli affairs. After all their guru, Alfred Wohlstetter, is the one who introduced Chalabi to his bitch, Richard Perle:

Almost to a man, Washington’s hawks lavishly praise Chalabi. “He’s a rare find,” says Max Singer, a trustee and co-founder of the Hudson Institute. “He’s deep in the Arab world and at the same time he is fundamentally a man of the West.”

In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Chalabi’s partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon’s Middle-East policy offices — such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.

The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi’s cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). “Chalabi is the one that we know the best,” says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. “He could be Iraq’s national leader,” says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.

What makes Chalabi so attractive to the Washington war party? Most importantly, he’s a co-thinker: a mathematician trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago and a banker (who years ago hit it off with Albert Wohlstetter, the theorist who was a godfather of the neoconservative movement), a fellow mathematician and a University of Chicago strategist. In 1985, Wohlstetter (who died in 1997) introduced Chalabi to Perle, then the undersecretary of defense for international-security policy under President Reagan and one of Wohlstetter’s leading acolytes. The two have been close ever since. In early October, Perle and Chalabi shared a podium at an American Enterprise Institute conference called “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” which was held, appropriately enough, in AEI’s 12th-floor Wohlstetter Conference Center. “The Iraqi National Congress has been the philosophical voice of free Iraq for a dozen years,” Perle told me.

Perle said just yesterday,

The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him.”

“He has devoted his life to freeing his country,” Perle added. “He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous.”

I don’t think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.