Chalabi in DC

I've just returned from a circus-like appearance by Ahmed Chalabi at the American Enterprise Institute.  This was Chalabi's first visit to the U.S. in two and a half years and the first since he has been accused of passing American codes to the government of Iran, and since his home was raided by American forces a year ago.  Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress pushed faulty and false intelligence on the Bush administration prior to the war, which Cheney and his cohorts readily ate up.  This speech was his first moment of potential accountability since the war began.

The audience for the speech was a star cast of top Washington reporters and thinkers: David Corn of The Nation, Matt Yglesias of The American Prospect, Reuel Marc Gerecht of AEI, David Schuster of MSNBC's Hardball, Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Michael Barone of US News & World Report, Fouad Ajami of SAIS, David Frum of The National Review, Robin Wright of The Washington Post, and Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair and Slate.  And those were just the people I recognized off-hand.

The room of about 80 people was packed.  When Chalabi finally took the podium, he looked incredibly nervous and hesitant.  I guess I would be as well if I was being investigated (however anemically) by the FBI into the passing of American codes to the Iranians and being harassed by reporters wanting to know why his claims of WMD in Iraq turned out to be so wrong.

Here are a few choice quotes from Chalabi.  I wasn't actively taking notes, but a few things jumped out as particularly noteworthy, shocking, absurd or some combination therein.

• "Most of the Ba'ath Party was Shia."  Huh?  I'm not sure where he's getting this from, but I'm pretty sure that it is blatantly not true. 
• "The fact that I misled the U.S. is an urban myth."  Well, he has certainly picked up on the Bush administration's favored tactic when faced with overwhelming evidence of wrong-doing: deny and summarily dismiss the argument out-of-hand.  Period.  It will go away!
• "I did not pass sensitive information to Iran."  This may not be a surprising quotation, but perhaps you had to be there to see how he was saying this.  I don't think I've ever seen anyone more uncomfortable in my life.  The fact that he was speaking a lie was all over his face.
• "I would go to the Senate and answer questions."  Well, he has offered.  Now where are the senators on the intelligence committee calling for a hearing?  Anyone?
• "I have a multi-dimensional relationship with the Bush administration."  There's a euphemism if I ever heard one.  Chalabi went from the administration's best friend to the top of its black list and now back to its uncomfortable friend all within three years.  Multi-dimensional is a good word for it, to say the least.
• "It is not useful for me to comment on this.  That is in the past."  This is what Chalabi said when asked about how he pushed fraudulent and faulty intelligence about Saddam's WMD's.  Stunning.  The means justify the ends to him, even if the American public is paying the cost of those ends.  His only goal was to overthrow Saddam.  If that meant pimping false evidence so the United States would be persuaded into war, so be it.  So what if 2,000 American soldiers are now dead - he's deputy prime minister now.
• I don't have an exact quote for this one, but Chalabi also suggested that the U.S. needn't really ever leave Iraq.  They should just pull back to a few bases eventually.  Why should the U.S. stay and keep bases in Iraq?  To protect Iraq from its neighbors.  Not to keep Iraq from descending into civil war, but to keep Iraq free from interference from its threatening neighbors.  The man really does think that the U.S. military is his own play thing.
• Chalabi also spoke about Iraqi oil.  For a while.  This portion, quite appropriately, was when he seemed to lighten up and he developed a somewhat evil smile as he spoke about the possibilities for Iraqi oil.  It may sound typically leftist of me, but he seriously began to get an animated look in his eye suggesting that the topic of Iraqi oil was where his real interest lay.  Spooky.

The cast of characters who attended the speech, other than reporters and notable intellectuals, was interesting.  I spotted people from a variety of sketchy-sounding energy and consulting companies.  Just to name a few: C & O Resources, ExxonMobil, Orion Strategies, Aries Group and Goodwin Procter LLP.  Mind you, I don't know what these or some of the other companies and organizations do, but I was sufficiently suspicious of their presence at the Chalabi speech.

After the speech I followed the throng out of the room and was able to get a few good pictures of Chalabi as he left.  In the elevator lobby I met Matt Yglesias, whose various blogs I read on a regular basis.  He seemed equally amazed by Chalabi's gall.  Here is his take on Chalabi's dismissal of any wrong-doing.  I hadn't read the "page 108" Chalabi was referring to, but Matt has and points it out.  As Matt says, it certainly is a curious way to exonerate oneself.

After pausing to see who else I recognized, I took an elevator down with Christopher Hitchens and David Corn, among other people.  Talk about a recipe for conflict.  Hitchens used to write for The Nation until his pro-war position became untenable and he left in disgust.  Corn is still there and is The Nation's marquee reporter.  Awkward!  The two of them almost immediately started going at it over the CIA leak case.  I didn't catch the whole thing, but watching the two of them go at it was priceless.  Their argument continued outside for about five minutes while Hitchens lit up a smoke, and Corn got apoplectic about the absurdity of the Bush administration's claims about the war.  It was incredible theater. 

After a few minutes I introduced myself to Hitchens and took the opportunity to ask him about his March 2005 piece in Vanity Fair where he looked into the incredible voter irregularities in Ohio, where I voted while at Kenyon College.  I asked him if he thought that the election could have gone the other way had these irregularities not existed and he scoffed at the suggestion.  "It wouldn't have been in the Democrats' interests to pursue an investigation into the irregularities.  Just like with Nixon in Illinois [in 1960], it was best for both sides not to bring it to the fore."  I still have my doubts.

Hitchens then turned the subject back to Chalabi, his good friend.  I asked him if he thought Chalabi had been passing American intelligence to the Iranians.  "No," he insisted.  "It's possible that with his training, you know, at [The University of] Chicago that with his own ability he was able to crack the codes.  He is a mathematical genius.  His expertise is cryptology.  It is possible that he broke the codes himself."  (This is a paraphrase since I was walking down M Street and crossing Connecticut Avenue all while being amazed that I was having an actual conversation with Christopher Hitchens at the time).  Now, I don't believe this for one second.  Why would Chalabi be trying to break American codes in his spare time anyway?  Who does that if they are friendly to us?  Suspicious, I say.

I noticed that Hitchens was without his Kurdish flag lapel pin.  He has been wearing it for years as a symbol of what is possible and as a sign of solidarity with the long oppressed Kurds of northern Iraq.  He said he had lost the pin and felt naked without it.  That is certainly no good.  At Connecticut Avenue we parted ways and I again mentioned that he should try to get back to Kenyon if he could get the chance.  We may disagree on Chalabi, but Hitchens is someone who I wouldn't mind spending some time listening to and arguing with.  Maybe some other time. 

Anyway, there is my close encounter with Ahmed Chalabi, the man who sold the Bush administration a war in Iraq.  Now I'm going to wash my hands.

**UPDATE**: If you're interested in more of the substance of the speech (which I skimmed for the most part), be sure to read this account by David Donadio at Cont'd, the new blog of The American Interest.  Donadio is also a Kenyon alum and is now the Deputy Managing Editor at The American Interest.

Comments

[cee]

Thanks for posting this. You should cross-post to some of the more heavily trafficked blogs to get this summary out to a wider audience.

[fpc]

On "Orion Strategies":

"Scheunemann runs a Washington lobbying firm called Orion Strategies, which shares the same address as that of the Iraqi National Congress' Washington spokesman and the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Orion's clients include Romania, which signed a nine-month, $175,000 deal earlier this year. Among other things, the contract calls for Orion to promote Romania's "interests in the reconstruction of Iraq."

Scheunemann has also traveled to Latvia, which is a former Orion client, and met with a business group to discuss prospects in Iraq."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6489.htm

[Jonathan Ryshpan]

Chalabi has a PhD from the Univ. of Chicago in Math, so he is a very good mathematician; but his thesis is in knot theory, which is not much like code thory. It's possible that he is also interested in codes, but I doubt it.

A reference, from magazine.uchicago.edu/0306/alumni/lines.shtml
is:

"Chalabi, who did his mathematics thesis at Chicago on the theory of knots"

[Daniel Biss]

Not that it's the main point, but let me offer, as a member of Chicago's math faculty, as someone who's heard the phrase "mathematical genius" tossed around as though it means something about a thousand times too many, and, most of all, as someone who knows precisely how tenuous is the relationship between the area of mathematics in which Chalabi could (nominally) have been called an expert (30 years ago) and cryptology:
Hitchens's claim that Chalabi might have broken the codes himself is just completely insane.

[Cheez Whiz]

Chalabi cracking US codes? Jesus, the NSA is up in arms about the PGP encryption anyone can use for their email these days, it causes them that much trouble. If the NSA's research into large number factorization, supercomputers and quantum computers has trouble with off the shelf encryption, does anyone honestly think that Chalabi could have descrypted a single bit of the US codes. Hitchens doesn't have a clue.

[Robert]

Excellent post - first person blogging like this is very cool!

[Daniel Biss]

Funny that more people than just I are interested in Chalabi's mathematics :)

Jonathan: Chalabi's publication record suggests that the Chicago magazine you cite is a bit off. Actually, his work was in group theory (to be more exact, somewhere between group theory and homological algebra). This actually positions him somewhat better vis-a-vis cryptography than knot theory would, but it's still not so close.

More to the point, advances in computers totally changed the world of coding theory in the 80's and 90's, so unless he was working AWFULLY hard on mathematics (on the side) at the same time that he was rising in the world of creepy international playerism, it's inconceivable that he was positioned to break any codes in the 3rd millenium.

[Seixon]

I've heard that the majority of the Ba'ath Party was Shia from somewhere else. I'm pretty sure it was from a liberal source, too. So if Chalabi and a liberal source are saying the same thing, I'm guessing it's true...

I think it's interesting that Chalabi is back in the USA. I wonder what he is doing here. Are the Americans spying on him? Is he going to be interrogated by the FBI? Is he going to take part in a new Senate investigation? Here to... buddy up with people?

He's got to be here for a reason...

[bluebird]

Why does anybody listen to this notorious boozer (talking Hitchens here) anymore?

[Greg Priddy]

Speaking of Chalabi, I just posted on my blog this evening on signs that Chalabi may be colluding with Iran against other Shi'ite politicians and Ayatollah Sistani.

[Zeno]

So is Hitchens saying that Nixon decided to forgo a protest of the 1960 presidential vote in Illinois? It's become a popular myth that Nixon told Kennedy he was not contesting the election outcome "for the good of the country". In fact, Nixon's people were all over Illinois and Texas, hoping to find a way to flip those states into the GOP column. That wouldn't have been enough, though, to deliver the presidency to Nixon, so they gave up.

[Big Green]

When Chalabi says most of the Baath party was Shia he's likely referencing the fact that the Syrian Baath party is Shia.

[Tom T]

I am a mathematician who works in an area quite close to cryptology. There is *no way* Chalabi would have been able to crack the codes himself. He would have about as much chance of doing that as of buliding his own nuclear bombs.

Also, his specialty is not cryptology.

[punaise / berkeley]

Nice post, thanks for sharing.

Chalabi should be subpoenaed.
I'm irretrievably late to the Hitchens-appreciation party: I think he's a blithering insufferable idiot.

[Gilman]

Why would anyone of clear mind want to invite that born-again increasingly right winger Hitchens to anywhere? Time to grow up and get over being star struck. Reminds me a bit of those students in 1983 at Michigan who signed up to speak to Alexander Haig privately, so they could get both sides of the story.

[Adam]

Chalabi broke the US codes? In his spare time?

wait for it...

wait for it...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(I hear he was also suspected of "feeding sensitive information" to Andrew Wiles.)

[Victor Freeh]

You folks are giving Hitchens far too much credit on this.

Suppose that Chalabi were a mathematical genius of top caliber and his expertise was in crytography. How many people fitting that description are wandering around? 500? 1000? And Hitchens thinks that these people can just sit down and crack the US government's codes? And that the US government would continue to use codes that hundreds of people all over the world could just crack at will?

This statement is incredibly, breathtakingly stupid on the face of it.

[Aunt Deb]

I believe that membership in the Baath party was necessary, if you wanted to work or have some part of the social structure. It's quite possible that the majority of the Baath in Iraq was Shia, but those who wielded the power were certainly Sunni. At any rate, the point Chalabi is seeking to make seems unclear, unless he was defending albeit obliquely his initial ousting of all Baath party members from the new government and military. It's undoubtedly true that Chalabi's enemies in Iraq are drawn from all sects and parties, so any measure that immunizes him from the greatest possible number had to look attractive to him.

I read your friend's blog on the Chalabi meeting with interest -- he seems quite pro-Chalabi. In his opinion, the highlight of the meeting was a question raised by a Syrian regarding the possibility of democracy in Syria. I was left wondering just who that Syrian might be and what codes he'd broken to be included in the AEI audience.

[bob]

Goodwin Procter is a corporate law firm.

[Sheldon Rampton]

With regard to Hitchens' theory (which I agree is ridiculous), it should be noted that Chalabi is not accused of cracking U.S. codes, but rather of TELLING IRAN that the U.S. had cracked Iran's encryption codes. Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post story from June 2004:

"In a closed-door damage assessment on Capitol Hill, National Security Agency officials said the disclosure cut off a significant stream of information about Iran at a time when the United States is worried about the country's nuclear ambitions, its support for terrorist groups and its efforts to exert greater influence over Iraq. ... An investigation by the FBI was launched several weeks ago, officials said, after the United States intercepted a secret message from an Iranian intelligence agent in Baghdad who told his superiors in Tehran that Chalabi had revealed that Americans had cracked Iran's encryption code. The communication said a drunken American official gave Chalabi the information."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11043-2004Jun2.html

Of course, we can only speculate about the identity of the drunken American. Has Bush managed to stay off the bottle? Maybe someone should chat up Hitchens again and see if he has any special insights into who's boozing it up in Washington.

[Yuri Guri]

I hate to agree with Chalabi, but it is, in fact, quite true that most Iraqi Ba'ath members were Shi'a. Actually, the majority of the individuals whose faces appeared on the famous "deck of cards" of wanted men from Saddam's regime were Shi'a as well.

If I'm not mistaken Husayn's prime minister at the time of the first gulf war was a Shi'ite (Mohammed al Zubeidi), and he actually helped engineer the hecatomb in the south. This is why there have been a number of shady Islamist groups going around assassinating former Shi'a Ba'athists. There was definitely a significant component of the Shi'a that collaborated with Saddam and they are being culled as we speak.

[Adam Ierymenko]

You know, the comment about how he could have cracked the crypto himself is just priceless.

Yeah, he factored some *gigantic* RSA key in his spare time, and then he fished through all the random padding and found the actual message, and then he cracked the shared symmetric key, and finally he decyphered the protocol and was able to read the message which was probably full of numeric euphamisms and impenetrable jargon.

Give me a !@$! break.

This is priceless because it gives you an insight into the Tom Clancy fantasy world that these Neocons inhabit. They are postmodern quack intellectuals of the most reprehensible variety.

[dwahzon]

Kris,

Thanks for your post. It put a very human perspective on a briefly-mentioned news item.

Here's some more pictures taken from outside the AEI building...

http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2005/11/chalabiwelcome.html

[Rahul Mahajan]

Chalabi's comments about Shi'a in the Ba'ath are not exactly wrong. Until 1963 or so, it was a roughly equal partnership between Shi'i and Sunni (see e.g. Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, p. 1080).

If you look at the members of the Ba'ath Command from 1952-November 1963, it's about equal between Shi'a and Sunni; then, if you look November 1963-1970, the Shi'a drop to about 10%.

One reason is the split in the Ba'ath after the failure of the brief period of rule in 1963. The Shi'a mostly followed the faction that ended up losing and being drummed out.

But Batatu claims a bigger reason is the discriminatory practice of the mostly Sunni-dominated police of the Aref regimes. They were much harsher with Shi'a Ba'athists than with Sunnis, who were often of the same tribe or town as the police officers.

[Anonymous]

Why are people attempting to refute the claim that Chalabi cracked US codes, when the claim (by Hitchens) was that he may have cracked the Iranian code? After all, this story isn't about American codes at all, but (presumably) American decryption of Iranian codes. That said, unless the Iranian govt. is so suspicious of academic types as to shut out competent mathematicians from its spy services, it's unlikely their code was broken at all. It's just undergraduate level mathematics to write an (effectively) unbreakable code.