The Assassins' Gate (12 page)

In the later months of 2002, he made frequent trips to Washington, where he met with Paul Wolfowitz and other civilians at the Pentagon, and then the hawkish top officials of the vice president's staff, and then Cheney himself and Condoleezza Rice at the White House. In these meetings, Makiya and the American officials were courting each other and sussing each other out. The Americans wanted the imprimatur of Iraq's leading intellectual on their war, and they wanted to know what Makiya thought American soldiers would find in Iraq. Makiya wanted to know whether the administration was committed to his vision—a democratic vision for Iraq. The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and the vice president's office said exactly what Makiya wanted to hear. Unlike the career bureaucrats in the State Department, they seemed to feel passionately that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, could be transformed by democracy. They had their reasons for wanting to believe this, reasons that Makiya didn't entirely share, but the area of overlap was what mattered to him.

“If it is the right thing being done by the wrong people, I would still work with it,” Makiya said when I asked whether his newfound allies worried him at all. “That could very well end up being the case. But politics is far more complicated. I've seen so many really good people do such terrible things. It's very hard to judge any longer.” He rejected the way of thinking that pitted a “Wolfowitz school” against a “Clinton administration school” and passed judgment accordingly. “I suppose one way in which I've abandoned ideological politics is I prefer for people to think of me as a moralist more. You have to have moral criteria, constructed in such a general way that you shouldn't be able to say the wrong people, the right people. It's not that easy anymore.”

The test Makiya set was whether those in power were willing to do this moral thing: overthrow Saddam, establish democracy. And the Bush administration, led by its neoconservatives, seemed to be serious about both. For a man with Makiya's history, this was the promise of deliverance, and he didn't ask himself whether these Americans, or any Americans, were capable of achieving his goals. He didn't pause to worry that the damage their policy was doing to the Atlantic alliance and the UN, the arrogant posture of leading administration figures, the questionable claims about WMD and terrorist connections, Rumsfeld's ideas about military transformation, the history and ideology of Bush's war cabinet—that all of this might actually contribute to the undoing of his dream. Makiya couldn't afford to regard these matters as anything but peripheral to the main chance.

Along the way, he was generating plenty of ill will. In the interagency battles between Defense and State, even as he continued working on the State Department's Future of Iraq Project, Makiya sided quite publicly with the Pentagon. His monomaniacal style in the Democratic Principles Working Group bruised the feelings of more than a few of his fellow Iraqi exiles. And he made the fateful choice of linking his reputation with the most controversial exile of them all.

Ahmad Chalabi, the scion of a wealthy and politically powerful Shiite family, had left Baghdad as a teenager in 1958 after the nationalist coup that overthrew the monarchy. He was educated in England and in the United States, where he earned a doctorate in theoretical mathematics at the University of Chicago. But Chalabi made his first fortune and reputation in Jordan, as a banker with close ties to the royal family. He wore English-cut suits and silk ties and was known for his wide-ranging intellect, until he became better known for financial scandal. In 1989, Chalabi's Petra Bank collapsed, ruining numerous families in Iraq, and he fled Amman to London just ahead of an arrest warrant. When Makiya met him in Salahuddin, Iraqi Kurdistan, in October 1992, at an organizational meeting of the new Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi had recently been convicted in absentia by a Jordanian military tribunal on charges that included embezzlement, theft, and forgery, and sentenced to twenty-two years at hard labor. Chalabi claimed that the charges were politically motivated due to his opposition to the Saddam regime, from which Jordan was getting cheap oil. Jordanian officials have always insisted that Chalabi was a crook. At the very least, he was a careless manager given to self-dealing and sloppy record keeping—practices he kept up as the INC's chairman once the CIA, which played a central role in creating the organization after the Gulf War, began financing the INC with tens of millions of dollars. The agency also helped to transform Ahmad Chalabi from disgraced banker into opposition leader. Within a few months of his April 1992 conviction, he was already climbing his way to the top of Iraqi exile politics.

The shady past didn't interest Makiya. He was drawn instead to Chalabi's mind. They were seatmates on a flight once in 1994, and when Chalabi got up to use the lavatory, Makiya glanced at the book he'd been reading: a thick tome on the reconstruction of Germany after World War II. It was the beginning of a long mutual attraction. In Chalabi, Makiya saw a brilliant palace politician, a product of the monarchy when Iraq had a parliament and educated, secular men led the country. Makiya admitted that Chalabi had no practical experience of democratic politics. His rise to the top of the INC had nothing to do with elections. “His biggest failing is he operates like one of these nineteenth-century, T. E. Lawrence–type figures, behind the scenes—cloakroom, big-power politics. Mass politics mean nothing to him.” Nonetheless, Makiya convinced himself that Chalabi shared his liberal democratic beliefs. He also believed that the INC, unlike the established parties, which were founded years ago in the image of the Baath Party, “is porous, it's open, it doesn't work as a clandestine organization. It could never conspire.” Makiya saw in Chalabi a man of the future, a leader of independent-minded Iraqis who had already freed themselves from the region's failed ideologies. “He's not got a shred of Arab nationalist politics in him,” Makiya told me. “He doesn't think like an Arab or a Shiite or a religious person. He's the most likely of all those capable of leading Iraq to go in a democratic direction.”

The INC in its early days was an umbrella organization of Iraqi dissidents that included communists, monarchists, Islamists, Kurds, ex-Baathists, ex–military officers, and assorted liberals—including Kanan Makiya—in an uneasy and often unruly cohabitation. Chalabi maneuvered his way into the chairmanship of the INC and eventually set up its headquarters in the fashionable London neighborhood of Knightsbridge. But with the INC's botched coup attempts and bloody setbacks of the mid-1990s, Chalabi and his Washington benefactors turned on one another. From that point on, CIA and State regarded Chalabi with unconcealed suspicion and disdain. The agency began to look for other white knights, and it peeled the Kurdish, Shiite, and ex-military parties away from the INC's leadership.

Noah Feldman, a law professor who served as a constitutional adviser to the occupation authority in Iraq, called Chalabi “the Jay Gatsby of the Iraq War.” After 1996, Chalabi set about to reinvent himself again. Out of favor with the Clinton administration, he abandoned his doomed efforts to overthrow Saddam from Iraqi Kurdistan and established a new base of operations, in Washington, with a new plan. Assisted by his young American representative, Francis Brooke—an evangelical Christian and PR man who had first met Chalabi in London while on the CIA's payroll—Chalabi began to court the Republican right. His Virgil through Washington's purgatory was Richard Perle, who introduced Chalabi to a network of backers at such institutions as the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and the Gingrich Congress. Chalabi also ingratiated himself with Dick Cheney, who was running the Halliburton Corporation, with Paul Wolfowitz, who saw in Chalabi a like-minded intellectual, and with congressional conservatives like Trent Lott, Jesse Helms, and Newt Gingrich. These Republicans were all too happy to turn Clinton's failures in Iraq against the president.

And here was an Iraqi who was saying all the right things. In June 1997, Chalabi told an audience at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs—the group that had sponsored the conference from which the “Clean Break” strategy paper issued—that the INC could overthrow Saddam with modest American help and establish a democratic state with friendly ties to Israel. The INC also seemed to produce an inexhaustible supply of defectors with top-secret information about Saddam's efforts to rebuild his unconventional weapons programs and his terrorist training camps. When Congress passed and a politically weakened Clinton was forced to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, the INC became the beneficiary of millions of more dollars in government funding. Chalabi played the partisan wars of the late Clinton years in Washington perfectly, and he made himself the favorite Iraqi of the Republicans who were about to come back to power.

So when the new Bush administration got serious about regime change; not in principle and through the dubious cadres of Iraqi exile groups but with the full might of the American military, it was natural that Kanan Makiya and Ahmad Chalabi should turn to each other. “Ahmad needed a thinker, a liberal democratic thinker. He found Kanan,” a friend of both men told me. “Kanan needed a strong man committed to his ideas of liberal democracy, and he couldn't find anyone but Chalabi.” Makiya inherited Chalabi's old wars with agencies of the U.S. government—the State Department, the CIA—and made them his own; but unlike Chalabi, Makiya wasn't a born politician, and he handled his new role without the necessary smoothness and legerdemain. Feisal Istrabadi, a tough-talking Chicago lawyer whose family had lived near the Chalabis in Baghdad before 1958, first met Makiya at an opposition gathering in June 2002. “Kanan said to me that Iraq has one democrat—Ahmad Chalabi,” said Istrabadi, who would become Iraq's deputy ambassador to the UN in the interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. “My response was, ‘If there's only one democrat, so much for democracy in Iraq.' He was a religious zealot of Ahmad's, and he promoted the neocons' view, the Defense Department's view, that the Future of Iraq Project was going to weaken Ahmad. He opposed the project because a wider net weakened Ahmad—he used those words.”

That same month of June, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, who would oversee planning for postwar Iraq, invited Istrabadi to the Pentagon. Feith had one question: Whom did Istrabadi support in the Iraqi opposition? “I knew the answer he wanted,” Istrabadi told me, “but I said, ‘I support the principles of the INC.'” That wasn't good enough. Within a month, the civilians at the Pentagon who had been courting Istrabadi dropped him, and by the end of the year their hostility was undisguised. In the meantime, Makiya had changed his mind and joined the Democratic Principles Working Group. Istrabadi, who was also a member, soon realized that Makiya, as head of the coordinating committee, wanted to take control of writing the report. Some members dropped out; others were pushed aside. The feuds within the U.S. government spilled over into the group. In England for the first formal session, Istrabadi was startled one evening to find Tom Warrick of the State Department and Samantha Ravich from Cheney's office standing on the sidewalk outside a fancy London restaurant, screaming at each other. “That was the first time I realized how deeply personal the fight between the neocons and those who knew what they were talking about was.”

Makiya wasn't interested in keeping everyone happy and arriving at a consensus that would ensure no spoilers would be left out. He was more concerned with the democratic product than the democratic process of the Democratic Principles Working Group. Dissenting views were relegated to footnotes or appended at the end of the report. In one appendix, a political economist named Isam al-Khafaji emphasized the irony in Makiya's method:

A FINAL COMMENT regards the exaggerated self-admiration and quotes of certain declarations, or acts—no matter how trivial—that one member of the coordinating committee has written or done. THIS, ALONG SIDE THE PATRIMONIAL ROLE OF THE DOCUMENT WHICH DECIDED TO REJECT WHAT DOES NOT FIT WITH ITS POINTS OF VIEW, SEND AN ALARMING SIGNAL TO ALL OF US ABOUT OUR DEMOCRATIC PRETENSIONS WHILE WE ARE STILL IN EXILE!!!!

“Kanan,” said Feisal Istrabadi, “wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”

Yet the “Report on the Transition to Democracy in Iraq” is a visionary document. It could never have been written by a committee: There's something in it to offend everyone, for Makiya didn't shy away from the implications of his own ideas. In discussing federalism, the sine qua non of Kurdish participation in a future Iraqi state, he argued that regions based on Arab and Kurdish identity would lead to a patchwork nation of second-class citizens; to guarantee absolute equality, federalism should be geographic, not ethnic—and a federal Iraq would no longer be an officially Arab Iraq. On the relation between mosque and state in overwhelmingly Islamic Iraq, Makiya wrote that a separation of the two “will have assisted in realizing the creative and spiritual potential present in religious faith when it is not shackled to the ebb and flow of politics.” This non-Arab, secular country should be demilitarized, along Japanese lines, so that Iraq would never again be an aggressor nation, and debaathified, along German lines, in order to root out the totalitarian ideology from the state and the society. There should be war-crimes trials, a truth and reconciliation commission, and a human-rights commission. A liberal constitution, with protections for individual and minority-group rights, should be written in advance of elections, or else democracy would produce a tyranny of the majority. Finally, since no opposition politics existed inside Saddam's Iraq, the nucleus of the first post-Saddam government should be formed at the opposition conference scheduled for the end of 2002 in London. It should be prepared to take authority over the first piece of Iraq liberated by American and allied troops (this provisional government should eventually double its numbers within Iraq). Thousands of exiles should be trained as a security force to impose law and order after the fall of the regime.