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Chalabi's Charade The Neocons' Man in Iraq by Steve Sailer The American Conservative, July 5, 2004 |
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One of the many conundrums revolving around Ahmed Chalabi, that International Man of Mystery, is why so many neoconservatives took seriously his assertions that he was devoted to democracy. In the Wall Street Journal, for example, Seth Lipsky extolled the convicted embezzler as a "democratic visionary." Why did it never occur to them that Chalabi might simply be blowing smoke? More broadly, why hadn't it dawned upon the neocons that their obsession with this kind of ideological declaration is outdated? Hadn't liberals been embarrassed by megalomaniacal Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutionaries who orated passionately about democracy while they were hiding in the hills, but once in power quickly came to feel: "Hey, we didn't spend all those years in the jungle living on fried iguanas just to be voted out in some maricon election." Hadn't conservatives been burned by the thuggish Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel who said all the right things about elections and free enterprise, but whose murderous behavior seemed to be based on the personal philosophy that: "I am the biggest Big Man, and therefore anyone who gets in the way deserves to step on one of my landmines." Last February, an Oxford Research survey found that only 0.2 percent of Iraqis consider Chalabi the "leader they trust the most." Yet, the neocons long assumed that a majority in Iraq would vote for a man on the lam from a sentence of 22 years hard labor in neighboring Jordan for fraud in the collapse of the Chalabi family's Petra Bank. While the assembled intellects at the American Enterprise Institute might buy Chalabi's rationalization that Saddam framed him, what mattered is that the common people in Jordan, some of whom lost their life savings, didn't. From Jordan, Chalabi's reputation as "Ahmed-the-Thief" filtered into Iraq. What does Chalabi really want? The simplest guess is that he wants what too many ambitious Iraqis want these days: to be a trillionaire. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Iraq is estimated to hold 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves." At $40 per barrel, Iraq's oil is worth $4.6 trillion. Sure, Iraq's last trillionaire, Saddam Hussein, ended up in a hole in the ground, but he had one helluva ride along the way. In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer quoted Scott Ritter, the much-reviled but apparently truth-telling weapons inspector, as saying, "[Chalabi] told me [in 1998] that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of." More generally, Chalabi successfully yanked the neocon chain because they refused to admit to themselves that the age of ideology, in which they usefully argued against communism, ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, to provide ideological justification for their Iraq Attaq, the neocons resorted to neologisms like "Islamofacism," a purported dogma alleged to motivate even Muslims as mutually hostile as Saddam and Osama. In reality, the end of ideology was not the "end of history," as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed. Instead, after two centuries of occasionally battling over what is the ideal form of government, the human race has reverted to its traditional pastime of brawling over who gets to run the government. In understanding affairs of state in the non-Western world today, neither Mein Kampf nor Das Kapital nor the Gettysburg Address is as insightful a guide as The Godfather. We're actually better off in our new world where we need to worry more about organized crime clans than about great powers animated by radical ideologies. The Mafia, for all its sins, never targeted a thousand nuclear missiles upon America. The Chalabi dynasty is old, rich, and unpopular. Nonetheless, Chalabi persuaded the Interim Governing Council to appoint him to the lucrative post of Finance Minister. He then used his influence to fill many of the other top positions with allies. Further, as William Beeman, director of Middle East Studies at Brown University noted, "Chalabi has created extra insurance by installing his relatives everywhere in the post-June 30th governmental structure, in true Middle Eastern fashion. They are the most loyal employees of all, and his potential successors. First and foremost among them are his nephews. The term "nepotism" comes from the Italian nepote -- 'nephew.' Mr. Chalabi has nephews galore." Nor is Chalabi overlooking the private sector. As Newsweek reported, "Today his extensive network of cousins and nephews runs almost every major bank." In the Middle East, the popularity of cousin marriage turbocharges the nepotistic urge to shove relatives into government jobs, since nephews are often also sons-in-laws. Last year, Ann Marlowe visited Baghdad and reported: "I was fascinated with an article that claimed as many as half of Iraqi marriages were between first or second cousins, and that this made democracy difficult. On my first day there, I'd gone to see Ahmed Chalabi to see if he would discuss it for an interview. 'By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, inbreeding makes the development of civil society more difficult,' Steve Sailer wrote in The American Conservative. 'The clannishness, corruption, and coups frequently observed in countries such as Iraq appear to be tied into the high rates of inbreeding.'" (By the way, Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, has chosen this "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" essay, from our January 13, 2003 issue, for inclusion in the anthology Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.) Marlowe continued: "When I asked Ahmed his view of this theory, he snorted: 'The Jews have had cousin marriages galore, and it hasn't hurt them.'" I would argue that I have had the last laugh in this debate, except that the Chalabi family appears to be crying all the way to the bank. Iraq's new prime minister-designate, Iyad Allawi, is the cousin of the defense minister Ali Allawi, who is Chalabi's nephew. Whether Iyad and Ahmed will be clannish colleagues or relative rivals is impossible for me to predict, but clearly the regime we are creating will be rife with dynastic intrigues. American intellectuals have a terrible time understanding the political significance of crime families like the Chalabis because they pay so little attention to their own extended families. In parts of the world less blessed by honest administration of justice, however, maintaining close bonds to distant relatives offers the surest security and advancement. Paradoxically, the neoconservatives should be able to grasp the importance of clan connections better than other Western elites since they are increasingly linked to each other by marriage and blood. Long time Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, for instance, is the father of columnist John Podhoretz, the father-in-law of Elliot Abrams (President Bush's senior adviser on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), and the grandfather of four young Israelis. Further, the key neocon institutions of the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute are connected by the Kristols, father and son. Lynne Cheney, a senior fellow at AEI, is the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, who in turn chose AEI fellows for war-making roles in the Administration. As the neocons meld into one big happy family, their new solidarity makes them brutally effective at bureaucratic in-fighting, but also disinclines them to harshly debunk each other's delusions. Thus, they dragged all of us into Chalabi's charade.
The American Conservative's Film Critic, Steve Sailer also writes for VDARE.com and iSteve.com.
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