In a more just world, Ahmed Chalabi would spend the rest of his life afraid to set foot in the United States. After all, what could possibly await him in Uncle Sam's jurisdiction but a bundle of awkward subpoenas and summonses? The man in question stands accused of passing classified information from the U.S. government to Iran. He's also clearly at the heart of any serious effort to investigate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's WMD programs and alleged ties to al-Qaeda. For that matter, he's also at the heart of any serious effort to understand how and why America's pre-war planning for the occupation of Iraq wound up ignoring the counsel of most of the relevant professionals.
Under the circumstances, it would be only natural for him to stay away in order to avoid the inevitable unpleasant encounters with the legal system.
But returning he is. Not to be interviewed by FBI counterintelligence officers. Not to testify before a grand jury. Not to be hauled in front of a congressional committee or two. Certainly not to speak with the bipartisan independent commission on intelligence failures that ought to exist but doesn't. No. He'll be back in our nation's capital Wednesday afternoon to deliver a speech to the American Enterprise Institute. The topic: "An Insider's View: Democratic Politics at Work in Iraq." Vital questions about how and why the United States wound up invading and occupying Iraq in order to dismantle a nuclear weapons program that didn't exist won't be addressed. Instead: "Will the constitution provide the foundation for a democratic system that can be a model for the Middle East?"
I can't explain exactly how it is that the sole source for Colin Powell's claim before the United Nations that Iraq had "biological weapons factories on wheels and rails" turns out to have been an eyewitness report from the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides (and a convicted embezzler, to boot). Nor can I explain exactly why the gentleman in question chose to fabricate this story out of whole cloth. Nor do I know exactly what engineer Adnan Ihsan Saheed al-Haideri was thinking when, at the behest of the Iraqi National Congress, he pretended to have personally seen 20 different WMD sites. Haideri portrayed himself as a true engineering jack of all trades, and the sites he pretended to have toured supposedly included chemical, biological, and nuclear sites. The New Yorker and Knight-Ridder, however, have reported that Haideri flunked a lie detector test administered before the war by U.S. intelligence officials. Yet Judith Miller was willing to write his story up on the front page of The New York Times. Despite the lack of verification and the small matter of the polygraph, she found unnamed experts to vouch that his reports "seemed reliable" and had provided the government with "dozens of highly credible reports."
What, exactly, was so credible about these reports I couldn't say. They weren't credible in the sense of being backed up by documentation. They weren't credible in the sense of being confirmed by the intelligence community through some other method. They certainly weren't credible in the sense of being offered by a person with no ulterior motives for telling his tale. Nor were they credible in the sense that Haideri could, say, pass a lie detector test about them. And at the time of the war, they weren't credible in the sense of being verified by officials from the UN Special Commission or the International Atomic Energy Agency with on-the-ground reporting.
So what happened?
These are tough questions, questions Chalabi could shed some light on. But will Iraq's constitution "be a model for the Middle East?" That's easy. The answer is no. Arabs aren't morons. They're well aware that plenty of democratic countries have democratic constitutions of various sorts and that a constitution is the sort of thing you probably want to have in a democracy. They're no doubt also well aware that Egypt has a fine-sounding constitution, just as the Soviet Union had several noble constitutions over the years, and the People's Republic of China has one today.
A better model for the people of the Middle East might be for the United States to provide a lesson in the concepts of transparency and accountability. If the leader of a democratic country tells his fellow citizens that they should go to war and then offers a bunch of factual claims explaining why war is a good idea, but then almost all of those claims turn out to be wrong -- well, someone ought to look into the matter. Instead, as Senate Democrats made clear with a canny stunt last week, the Republican Party's view is that the matter ought to be swept under the rug with hefty doses of stonewalling and cover-up. Chalabi -- the man at the center of the affair -- won't be testifying before any inquiries because they don't exist.
Nor is the right even demonstrating the decency to be a bit ashamed about this whole sorry situation. Chalabi will not only go un-interrogated; he will be feted at the nation's leading neoconservative think tank. I'd like a one-on-one interview with the Secretary of State, but I can't get one. Chalabi will, according to the Associated Press. And he will meet not just Condoleezza Rice, but "probably other senior Bush administration officials." Various columnists have, in recent months, begin touting the idea that putting Chalabi in charge of Iraq just may be the solution to America's problems there. Apparently, the administration intends to pursue this line of thought. Inquiries into how and why he duped the country into war and the nature of his ties to the Iranian government are off the table.
That the administration is uninterested in such inquiries is no surprise. That anyone would be so brazen as to bring Chalabi to town at the very moment when pressure for a serious investigation of the origins of the war is mounting is, however, a bit shocking. Bush's poll numbers are at an all-time low, and if turning to Chalabi reflects the quality of political thinking inside today's White House, they may have quite a bit further to fall.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
