Truth - Al Franken [108]
This war cannot be about partisan politics. But for George W. Bush and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, nothing but partisan politics exists. Man’s genetic relationship to apes is a partisan political issue. The effect of atmospheric carbon on the Earth’s absorption of heat from the sun is, to them, a partisan political issue. The likelihood of Terri Schiavo joining the Rockettes is a partisan political issue. And on this, the most solemn duty of a commander in chief, war, they still can’t reach past politics and touch reality. They will not die in battle. Their children will not die in battle. Short of a Congress with a backbone, there is nothing that will shake them from the fantasy that they’re winning this war. And that the only battle that requires their attention is the battle of perception. As we lose the hearts and minds of Iraqis day after day, the White House’s obsession remains the hearts and minds and future votes of Americans.
Last we left him, Ahmed Chalabi was cooling his heels in a not-so-cool abandoned military base in the desert southeast of Baghdad. It was a far cry from the gated estate in Tehran that the American government had bought for him, and from which he had watched his deeply laid plans for a U.S. invasion of Iraq bear fruit. Or, for that matter, the hillside mansion outside of Amman, Jordan, where his children had ridden horses with that country’s royal family while he stayed busy embezzling $230 million through the Petra Bank that he founded there. Or the country squire’s estate in Middleburg, Virginia, purchased with some of those embezzled funds and to which he fled after being indicted in Jordan. Most galling, it was a far cry, and at the same time just a little too far, from the million-plus square meters of downtown Baghdad that had belonged to Ahmed Chalabi’s family before the 1958 Baathist Revolution, and which he believed it was his birthright to reclaim.
What happened next is a testament to the extended family values that have enabled Chalabi to insert tentacles into a variety of corrupt and/or powerful institutions that should have known better. Institutions like the Swiss investment firm Socofi, the CIA, the Pentagon, and, in this case, The New York Times. Upon learning by satellite phone that her uncle was languishing in the desert, the manager of the Times office in Kuwait, Sarah Kahlil, Chalabi’s niece, tapped funds from Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, and personally liberated her uncle and his men with a fleet of SUVs.
Chalabi was back.
Having failed to gain power as the leader of a popular uprising, he adapted with the kind of flexibility that the Bush administration could have learned from, deciding instead to win power as a warlord. After a certain amount of looting and pillaging on his way into Baghdad, Chalabi called in one final chit from his patrons at the Pentagon and was awarded a coveted seat on the twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council. Moving decisively to consolidate power, he appointed friends and family members as heads of the oil, finance, and trade ministries, as well as the Central Bank.
Chalabi’s lifelong interest in financial matters extended to Iraq’s newly privatized private sector. One crony received millions of dollars to secure the country’s oil infrastructure, and another was given an enormous cell-phone contract. Though Chalabi was far and away the winner of a March 2004 poll asking whom Iraqis trusted least (beating out second-place finisher Saddam Hussein by more than three to one), everything seemed to be falling into place for Ahmed Chalabi.
But somehow, amid all the lying, all the cronyism, all the scheming, all the looting, somehow he had fallen out of favor with the Bush administration, which was slowly coming to the same conclusion as the Iraqi people. When U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi was asked by the White House to put