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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (100839)	2/17/2005 5:46:31 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793608

David Frums Diary - FEB. 16, 2005: THE FINALISTS Three weeks ago, TIME magazine profiled the leading candidates for the job of prime minister of Iraq. TIME's list did not mention Ahmed Chalabi. TIME apparently concluded that Chalabi was a finished force who had sold himself to the ayatollahs in exchange for a place on the United Iraqi Alliance list the clerics supposedly controlled. Instead, Chalabi has emerged as one of the two finalists. TIME didn't see it coming. Neither frankly did much of the US foreign policy apparatus. The foreign-policy establishment had told itself so loudly and so often that Chalabi was a nothing, an unpopular exile, an invention of a handful of loose cannon Pentagon neocons, that they lost the ability to see political facts as they were. Now, faced with reality, a weird kind of panic is setting in. The last remaining alternative to Chalabi is Ibrahim al-Jaffari, head of the Islamicist Dawa party. Despite the party's close ties to Iran and Jaffari's far-from-pro-American views, the hard-core Chalabi opponents in the US government seem bent on promoting even him in order to thwart Chalabi. Is there not something strange and obsessional about this? Iraq's prime minister is for Iraqis to choose. But America does have some weight in the process - and it seems astonishing that any portion of that weight would be exerted in favor of a candidate like al-Jaffari, solely in order to vent some ancient bureaucratic spite against Chalabi. There's a theory in Iraq - it sometimes get picked up on English-language Internet sites as well - that the whole CIA-Chalabi quarrel is a clever American ploy to make the US guy look like an Iraqi nationalist. If only the US government were that cunning and that capable! The truth is that we have here a case of personal agendas and institutional vendettas driving national policy. It's an abuse of power, it's wrong from both an American and an Iraqi point of view - and it's long past time for it to stop.