More than any other figure in the world, Ahmed Chalabi shines a harsh glare on the Bush administration’s prevarication on pre-war Iraqi intelligence. So for those seeking to keep the momentum of the indictment of I. Lying Libby going, Chalabi’s week-long visit to Washington is made to order.
Chalabi made everything even worse by making sure be photographed during a high-profile visit to Teheran on his way to Washington, where he met with Iran’s new foreign minister and with Mahmoud “Wipe Israel Off the Map” Ahmadinejad. Iran, said Chalabi, “has played a positive role in the composition and formation of the Iraqi government.” Come again? If Chalabi is saying that, it can only mean that Teheran was backing him, since to Chalabi “positive role” means “support me.” It’s almost st surreal: the neoconservatives’ principal cats-paw in Iraq meeting with Mr. Axis of Evil himself. When Hamlet noted that one can “smile, and smile, and be a villain,” he surely wasn’t referring to a meeting in which both villains smile. But smile they did.
To mix a metaphor, neoconservative spokesmen in Washington are doing back flips to square this circle. Patrick Clawson, the Iran expert at the neoconservative Washington Institute for Near East Affairs, who has long been a defender of Chalabi, now quietly disagrees with Chalabi’s assessment that Iran can be moderated in its fundamentalist fanaticism. Other neoconservatives are just plain quiet. Which puts all eyes on Ahmed Chalabi’s high-wire act this Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute.
Meanwhile, Knight-Ridder’s John Walcott reports that the U.S. intelligence and FBI investigation into charges that Chalabi leaked top-secret information to Iran is proceeding “very slowly, if at all.”
Steve Clemons says it bluntly: “Chalabi should be in jail for the combination of espionage, lies, and deceit that he used to help seduce America into an invasion of Iraq that has left our nation's military and economic portfolio in tatters.” True. But what has he done against us lately? That is the question we all ought to be asking—not what Chalabi did to get us into the war (we know that) but is Chalabi doing now?