Guest columnist
Chalabi played neocons (and the media) like a violin

By Floyd J. McKay
Special to The Times

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In a highly unusual "From the Editors" column in The New York Times of May 26, the newspaper apologized to readers for having been taken in by a misinformation campaign conducted by Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and his friends in the Bush administration.

"Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources," The Times reported. "So did many news organizations — in particular, this one."

The Times' mea culpa follows a March 17 report by Knight Ridder Newspapers detailing how Chalabi, often in compliance with administration hardliners, fed bad information to American news outlets, including the Associated Press, the major source of international news for most American newspapers.

Chalabi's gravy train hit a roadside bomb in recent weeks. He is suspected of leaking important intelligence to Iran. His American taxpayer subsidy, nearly $40 million in the past four years, is gone and he is conspicuously missing from the new Iraqi Cabinet.

Within the journalism community, the role of anonymous sources in reporting from and about Iraq has been controversial. Often the sources were Chalabi and others he identified for reporters.

Perhaps the most controversial pieces were written by New York Times reporter Judith Miller, regarded as an expert on the Middle East, in December 2001 and April 2003. Both articles were listed by The Times as instances where the newspaper was duped.

Both The New York Times and Knight Ridder also implicated the corps of neoconservatives who were enamored of Chalabi since before Bush took office.

Chalabi was born into a powerful and wealthy Baghdad family that left Iraq when he was 14. Thirty-four years later (in 1992), he formed an exile organization quickly linked to individuals who would later form the core of Bush administration policy on Iraq. (For an in-depth Chalabi profile, see Jane Mayer in the June 7 edition of The New Yorker.)

A 1998 open letter to President Clinton, calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and recognition of an Iraqi government based on Chalabi's organization, was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Armitage and Elliott Abrams, among others. Also closely allied with Chalabi have been Vice President Dick Cheney and Richard Perle, a key architect of George Bush's Middle East policy.

Except for Armitage, a close associate of Colin Powell, the names are those of the neoconservatives who have dominated Middle East policy in the Bush administration. Chalabi played them like a violin; his tune was music to their ideological ears.

Chalabi met personally with President Bush, and sat with first lady Laura Bush at the 2004 State of the Union speech. He was one of the first named to the Iraq Governing Council.

America was led into a bloody and continuing war on the basis of misleading and sometimes false information, much of it coming from Iraqi exiles with their own agenda and the ability to convince gullible American officials who heard exactly what they wanted to hear.

As the death toll of American soldiers goes over 800, and the toll of wounded is in the thousands and as the death toll of Iraqi civilians is in the thousands, more is needed than shunting Ahmad Chalabi to the sidelines.

Chalabi, after all, was pursuing his own personal fortunes. They just happened to coincide with the political needs of the Bush administration, which had its eyes on Iraq well before 9-11 provided an invasion excuse. Chalabi, a clever man by all accounts, simply fed the neoconservatives the information they wanted to hear.

Mayer quotes former CIA official Robert Baer, "Chalabi was scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed."

The media proved gullible as well. Reporters lacked good sources in Iraq (as did the CIA), and Chalabi carried the credibility of top American politicians, particularly in the Pentagon and vice president's office. It's an embarrassment for the news media.

But the media are of secondary concern.

What of the Bush administration, a team that never admits an error? CIA director George Tenet has resigned, but Tenet long ago broke with Chalabi after an early CIA involvement with him.

The entire flock of war hawks, Rumsfeld and Cheney and their aides, remains in place. They are culpable in ways far more serious than The New York Times or other news organizations that were sucked into the misinformation game.

It's time for the president to either accept his share of the blame or sack those who misled the American people.

Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail him at floydmckay@yahoo.com