is generally in securing the interview in the first place. Getting to it is just a matter of calling a taxi. In Baghdad the main problem may be covering the last 500 yards to see the person to be interviewed without undue danger. It is quite evident meeting Iraqis and foreigners in the Green Zone in Baghdad that few have the slightest idea of the risk involved in coming to see them. One ambassador happily gave a party starting at 9pm and invited people from outside the zone when not a cat is stirring in the streets of Baghdad.
I had called Mr Chalabi's office in the morning. I was in fact in the Green Zone seeing Kurdish friends when the reply came that he could see me almost immediately. He does not live in the Green Zone but in a fortress-like villa not far away. Two vehicles filled with armed men were sent to pick me up. We drove through the desolate streets of west Baghdad, which these days look like a war zone, at great speed, zigzagging around concrete blast walls and rolls of razor wire.
Mr Chalabi was waiting at the house in the al-Mansur district, once known as the embassy quarter of Baghdad but now a lethally dangerous place.
There were few cars about and by early evening those shops that had opened were closing. There were nervous-looking soldiers and police everywhere. We were to go on to another house, known as The Farm, which had once belonged to his father. For a man who is not officially a member of the government his police and army escort boasted significant firepower.
I had met Mr Chalabi in the early 1990s and had always been impressed by his skill as an operator and his ability to bounce back from defeat. He also had an ability to irritate his friends and attract the loathing of his enemies to a degree which seemed beyond reason. A few days before I met him in al-Mansur, an official in the Green Zone had told me with feeling that he considered Mr Chalabi to be "evil".
Yet much of what he had done during the 1990s was what all exiled oppositions do when trying to overthrow an authoritarian regime. They try to foment unrest, coups or mutinies inside their country and look for the backing of neighbouring states and the great powers. Mr Chalabi did what others in the Iraqi opposition did but with greater success. The US had failed to go on to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991. The opposition always wanted to lure it to try again. Attempted coups and mutinies had all failed by 1996. This was probably inevitable. Mr Chalabi once said to me that people "outside Iraq did not realise how difficult it was to try to overthrow a government with a violent and pro-active security service".
Did he invent evidence of weapons of mass destruction or prompt witnesses to do so? In fact all the opposition, particularly the Kurdish security services, were doing this. But it was absurd for the CIA and assorted American services and newspapers along with MI6 to claim later that they were misled. They knew what President George Bush and Tony Blair wanted and gave it to them.
Mr Chalabi's own justification for encouraging the US to invade is simple. He says he favoured the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by the US but not the subsequent occupation of Iraq to which he attributes all the disasters that followed. It is not an argument that goes down well in Washington or London. In April 2004 a meeting in the White House discussed a memo drawn up by the National Security Council entitled "Marginalising Chalabi".
Action swiftly followed. Mr Chalabi was accused of being too close to the Iranians and of telling their intelligence station chief in Baghdad that the US had broken Iranian codes. The FBI was told to investigate. A few days later, on 20 May, US-led forces raided his headquarters in Baghdad. His fortunes waned. After the parliamentary elections in December 2005 he was part of the Shia alliance that triumphed. He became deputy prime minister. At the election at the end of the year he stood outside the Shia alliance and did not win a single seat.
Sitting in his garden, Mr Chalabi is sceptical about the success of the security plan for Baghdad. He says that "there are less sectarian killings and places that were expected to be difficult like Sadr City [the Shia slum that houses two million people] were not". But he says the latter success was only possible because of successful negotiations that led to the Mehdi Army, the main Shia militia body, being stood down, through the influence of its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Iranians and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. He does not think that US-Iraqi army plan to seal off areas, the so-called gated communities, is going to work. He points out that in a Sunni commercial area such as al-Adhamiyah, most people who work there live outside the enclave. "In any case it is consecrating division in the city. There is nothing so permanent as a temporary solution."
At the same time he says firmly that "the Sunnis have lost the battle for Baghdad. They were encouraged to go on the offensive by Arab states that did nothing for them." He identifies one factor in the weakness of the Sunni, as confirmed by election results. They are far less numerous in Baghdad than they had supposed. Some had spoken of Baghdad being equally divided but Mr Chalabi thinks that the proportions in the capital are 80 per cent Shia and 20 per cent Sunni.
He sees the most immediate problem in Baghdad as being the return of people driven from their homes and detainees. "Efforts must be made to bring them back otherwise security is reversible. The displaced people are very angry and want to go home." Through popular committees he is trying to get mosques returned to their original community.
His judgement is different from that of many Iraqi and American officials in the Green Zone. He does not think that the Sadrists, the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr, are disintegrating: "A lot of it is wishful thinking. Their local leaders will all comply with what Muqtada al-Sadr says." A key element in ending the war is bringing in the Iranians: "An understanding through the Iraqi government between the US and Iran."
He does not think that Washington's famous "benchmarks" are more than slogans in Iraq. Giving Saddam Hussein's security services back their old jobs is just not acceptable. He does not add that the Shia and Kurds will veto such an idea but they certainly will. On US threats to withdraw he says "many Iraqis are asking if this is a promise or a threat" but he wants an agreement on the limits of the authority of the multinational forces, essentially the Americans and the British.
At this stage Mr Chalabi sees a US withdrawal as something that will be a function of US politics and not what is happening in Iraq. Essentially he sees the US and Britain as having unwittingly committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. "The US found that it had dismantled the cornerstone of the Arab security order."
The US and Britain have been trying ever since to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Baath party. They wanted "to prevent Shia control and limit Iranian influence in Iraq and in this they have not succeeded." And that is why they will leave.
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
IRAQ INVASION STRENGTHENED THE MILITANTS
Car bombs have almost as long a history as the car. What has changed since the invasion of Iraq is that bombers targeting civilian targets in the West now have a popular base and access to expertise in the Sunni community of Iraq.
The invasion was seen as an attack on Muslims as a whole by at least some Muslims in every country, who are willing and able to construct and deliver bombs. From the moment foreign armies were ordered into Iraq, al-Qa'ida was bound to be the winner. US spokesmen have long blamed al-Qa'ida for every attack in Iraq but in fact the Salafi, proponents of a puritanical and bigoted variant of Sunni Islam, and the Jihadi, willing to wage holy war, belong to many groups.
The al-Qa'ida of Osama bin Laden was a surprisingly weak organisation in Afghanistan and Pakistan before 2001. To make the blood curdling videos of militants training that are frequently shown in documentaries, al-Qa'ida had to hire local tribesmen.
It is in Iraq that al-Qa'ida has come into its own. The US proclamation of the group as its most dangerous enemy served only as effective advertising among young Sunni men. Such denunciations also made it much easier for al-Qa'ida to raise money in Saudi Arabia and
