"I think that calculation was mistaken. I don't think that there was a danger of Iraq breaking up. For one reason, any government of Iraq will dispose of substantial resources - you don't get a problem of separatism under such circumstances. For another, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which is the organized opposition movement, does contain representatives of all groups in Iraq - Arabs and Kurds, Sunni and Shia. If they form a successor government in Iraq, I don't doubt that they could hold the country together."
That seems like a rather optimistic assessment of the INC, especially coming from an "Arab Mind" type like Lewis. For a somewhat less sanguine view, there's Seymour Hersh's New Yorker coverage, linked here previously.
THE IRAQ HAWKS newyorker.com
In November of 1993, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group devoted to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, presented the Clinton Administration with a detailed, four-phase war plan entitled "The End Game," along with an urgent plea for money to finance it. "The time for the plan is now," Chalabi wrote. "Iraq is on the verge of spontaneous combustion. It only needs a trigger to set off a chain of events that will lead to the overthrow of Saddam." It was a message that Chalabi would repeat for the next eight years.
Chalabi, who is fifty-six, was born into a wealthy Iraqi Shiite banking family and earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He received money and authorization from the Clinton Administration to put his plan into effect, and by October, 1994, a small C.I.A. outpost had been set up in an area in northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds. Chalabi's headquarters were nearby. His plan called for simultaneous insurrections in Basra, the largest city in southern Iraq, which is dominated by disaffected Shiites (Saddam and his followers are Sunnis), and in Mosul and Kirkuk, Kurdish cities in the north. Massive Iraqi military defections would follow. "We called it Chalabi's rolling coup," Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent in charge, recounted.
At the time, Baer has written in "See No Evil," a memoir to be published next month, "the C.I.A. didn't have a single source in Iraq. . . . Not only were there no human sources in country, the C.I.A. didn't have any in the neighboring countries—Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—who reported on Iraq. Like the rest of the U.S. government, its intelligence-gathering apparatus was blind when it came to Iraq."
In March, 1995, Chalabi's insurrection was launched, and failed dramatically. "There was nothing there," Baer told me. "No one moved except one Kurdish leader acting on his own—three days too late. Nothing happened." As far as recruiting agents from inside the Iraqi military, "Chalabi didn't deliver a single lieutenant, let alone a colonel or a general." Baer emphasized that he wasn't dismissive of Chalabi himself, because, as he put it, "Chalabi was trying." Even so, Baer said, "he was bluffing—he thought it was better to bluff and try to win. But he was forced to play bridge with no trump cards." Baer went on, "He always thought it was a psychological war, and that if Clinton would stand up and say, 'It's time for the guy to go,' people would do it." . . .
THE DEBATE WITHIN newyorker.com
A dispute over Chalabi's potential usefulness preoccupies the bureaucracy, as the civilian leadership in the Pentagon continues to insist that only the I.N.C. can lead the opposition. At the same time, a former Administration official told me, "Everybody but the Pentagon and the office of the Vice-President wants to ditch the I.N.C." The I.N.C.'s critics note that Chalabi, despite years of effort and millions of dollars in American aid, is intensely unpopular today among many elements in Iraq. "If Chalabi is the guy, there could be a civil war after Saddam's overthrow," one former C.I.A. operative told me. A former high-level Pentagon official added, "There are some things that a President can't order up, and an internal opposition is one. Show me a Northern Alliance"—the opposition group in Afghanistan that, with United States help, scored early victories against the Taliban—"and then we can argue about what it will cost to back it up." |
