Why America invented Ahmad Chalabi
With his death, the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is once again in the news. Detractors rage about his supply of fabricated intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly tricked Washington into war. Supporters claim he was a heroic dissident who was never given the chance to transform his troubled country into paradise. Both miss the real story, which […]Gideon Rose reports for the New York Times:
With his death, the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is once again in the news. Detractors rage about his supply of fabricated intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly tricked Washington into war. Supporters claim he was a heroic dissident who was never given the chance to transform his troubled country into paradise. Both miss the real story, which is that Mr. Chalabi was less a cause of the Iraq war than a convenient enabler of it. He was an answer to America’s problems, not Iraq’s, and if he had never existed, his backers would probably have conjured up a replacement to serve the same function.
