Ayoun wa Azaan (Faust)
Jihad el-Khazen Al-Hayat - 07/04/08//
I did not finish reading the book by Jacob Heilbrunn, "They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons," because I wanted to finish a long article written by Scott Ritter, the former weapons of mass destruction inspector in Iraq, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the war.
Ritter wrote a book on the falsified intelligence evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a book on the attempts to target Iran. I found that his article picks up where Heilbrunn left off, with regard to the discussion of the neoconservatives and Ahmad Chalabi.
In brief, Heilbrunn spoke about the influence of Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago on his students and supporters, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Ahmad Chalabi and Zalmay Khalilzad. The professor was a strong supporter of Israel and would upbraid the liberal Jews who criticized it. In fact, the book only mentions Chalabi in the context of the names of leading neocons. It reveals that Vice President Dick Cheney did not trust him, and that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was concerned only with a hi-tech "shock and awe" war. However, the neocons were sponsors of Chalabi and considered him the future president of Iraq. In the end, they convinced everyone about Chalabi, which was followed by the alternative and false intelligence presented to justify the war.
Heilbrunn's book deals with a topic greater than just one individual. It is about the neocons and their rise, until they took full control of the US foreign policy. I nearly forgot the references to Ahmad Chalabi, if it had not been for Scott Ritter's article entitled "Dinner with Ahmad." This 14-page article talks about Ritter's meeting with Chalabi in Washington, which he was visiting in June 1998, and how Chalabi invited him to his home, to have dinner with him and some others.
Ritter says that Chalabi told him he would one day become the president of Iraq and control the country's oil. Chalabi pledged that he would not forget his friends who helped him in his hour of need - he would give them petroleum concessions that would make them very rich.
However, Chalabi's calculations did not turn out as he planned. He took over the Oil Ministry but left it in January 2006 to Hussein Shahristani, and failed that month to win a single seat for his list in the elections. This was despite the fact that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had brought him back as an official, responsible for improving the government's provision of water and electricity services to the public.
Also on hand for the dinner, according to Ritter, was Stephen Rademaker, a legal adviser to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, and later an Assistant Secretary of State for Nuclear Arms Proliferation. Rademaker later joined a lobbying firm working on oil autonomy for the Kurds.
Danielle Pletka, the wife of Rademaker, also joined the dinner gathering; she had left her job at the Senate to become the director of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, which advocated a war with Iraq and continues to support it. It issued a study on increasing the number of troops, a study George Bush decided to follow instead of heeding the advice of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group.
The article talks at length about Randy Scheunemann, the national security adviser to Senator Trent Lott, who was the majority leader of the Senate at the time. I read that Scheunemann worked for Rumsfeld briefly in 2001. However, he left his post the following year and helped set up the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which included Senator John McCain as an honorary member. Scheunemann convinced McCain to announce that Chalabi was "a patriot with the interest of Iraq at heart" and worked to increase the number of US troops in Iraq. He convinced McCain on this latter point, and Scheunemann is now a key advisor to him on foreign affairs.
I did not see Scheunemann's name in the book by Heilbrunn, "They Knew They Were Right." However, the book contains many details on the activities of Rademaker and Pletka, and how Perle supported her move to the American Enterprise Institute, and on James Woolsey, the head of the CIA for a short time, who is considered one of its worst directors. However, Woolsey found a place among the neocons, bringing together both extremism and ignorance.
Sometimes I feel that Chalabi was a kind of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil to obtain knowledge and power, as in the original play by Christopher Marlowe, which was inspired by ancient myth, or as in Goethe's book, which had Faust sell himself to the devil, Mephistoles, in exchange for magical powers and secret knowledge.
I assume that Chalabi sought power without knowledge, blinded as he was by his contacts among non-Iraqi circles and his alliance with the enemies of Arabs and Muslims to bring down Saddam Hussein. All of us called for the Iraqi president's exit from power, but what happened afterward was a disaster for Iraq, making the evils of Saddam Hussein pale in comparison. We have yet to hear whether Chalabi acknowledged his mistake and apologized for his role in the Iraq debacle. But there is nothing that he can do now to bring one million Iraqis back to the world of the living, or put his country on the path of safety.
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