Chalabi's Return

Harold's List
The Wall Street Journal

A year ago the Bush administration tried to destroy Ahmed Chalabi's chances of ever leading a free Iraq. This week the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister has meetings scheduled with Bush Cabinet members Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and John Snow, as well as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. What gives?

Let's hope it's a sign of maturity from a Bush foreign policy team that realizes it erred badly last year. Mr. Chalabi's political success in Iraq since that fiasco is impossible to ignore. The same man once derided as an "exile" with "no support" in Iraq brokered the Shiite alliance that dominated the country's free elections in January. Though a secular Shiite who believes in separation of mosque and state, Mr. Chalabi may be the Iraqi politician most trusted by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. He gets along well with Kurdish leaders and has influential Sunni allies as well, including Iraqi Defense Minister Saddoun Dulaimi.

In his current role, Mr. Chalabi was a central figure in drafting Iraq's new constitution, where he successfully pushed for language to create an Alaska-style trust to share oil revenues equally among Iraqi citizens. And he assumed special responsibility for oil and infrastructure protection, resulting in what one observer called "the highest crude oil exports in anyone's memory."

So why did the administration turn against Mr. Chalabi last year? Don't believe the line from media critics that he was the source of bad intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The Robb-Silberman Commission found that Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress had a "minimal impact" on Bush administration assessments of Iraqi WMD capabilities -- assessments no different from those the Clinton administration used to justify its 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign.

Rather, as the most visible lobbyist for U.S.-led regime change in Iraq, Mr. Chalabi was a political lightning rod long before we discovered that our intelligence agencies had erred on WMD. In the end, it was Mr. Chalabi's refusal to go along with various administration strategies in postwar Iraq -- particularly its outreach to Saddam's Baath Party and its desire to bring in the United Nations, whose Oil for Food corruption he was helping to expose -- that caused the White House to turn against him.

In May 2004, U.S. forces raided his home based on what appear to have been trumped up counterfeiting charges. Intelligence leaks -- which have curiously never been followed up, despite repeated requests by Mr. Chalabi to testify and clear his name -- alleged that he was an Iranian spy. That Mr. Chalabi was able to overcome this disinformation campaign is a testament to his resilience and his influence with other Iraqi political figures.

We'll be especially curious to see if Meghan O'Sullivan apologizes to Mr. Chalabi this week. She is now in charge of Iraq policy at the NSC, but in earlier jobs at the NSC and State Department she was among those who consistently spoke ill of Mr. Chalabi and tried to block the Iraqi National Congress from getting Congressionally mandated funds. Such meddling in Iraqi politics is fundamentally at odds with our democratizing mission, and it would be good to see her admit her mistake.

None of this is to say the U.S. should endorse Mr. Chalabi, or any other Iraqi politician, for Prime Minister after the December election. That's a decision for Iraqis to make. But Mr. Chalabi's prominence in Iraqi politics vindicates those who saw him as far back as the early 1990s as a believer in a democratic and pro-Western Iraq.