HOME > MISCONCEPTIONS AND THE FACTS >

Misconception 7

Did the Defense Department plan to "anoint" Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, as the leader of liberated Iraq?

• IN FACT:  The officials in charge of political reconstruction in Iraq were never asked or ordered by anyone, directly or indirectly, to favor any particular leader.

However often the story is repeated, it was and remains incorrect. I never advocated that the United States should select Iraq's leader, and I never heard Wolfowitz argue for favoring a particular Iraqi leader, whether Chalabi or anyone else. We knew Rumsfeld would not tolerate any of his subordinates playing such a game. (p. 254)

Ever since the mid-1990s, when Chalabi condemned the agency for incompetence, CIA officials had talked of him not just critically but with anger, even hatred. They produced an amazing volume of reports written to make him look ill-informed, ill-motivated, unskillful and untrustworthy. (p. 239-40)

For Rumsfeld, it was a consistent principle that U.S. officials should not try to pick specific leaders for other countries. That principle governed Rumsfeld's attitude toward Afghanistan as well as Iraq. But State and CIA officials tended not to share this principle, and did not even recognize that Rumsfeld was applying it. To them, Rumsfeld's insistence that the U.S. government should not discriminate for or against any of the friendly, prodemocratic groups was seen merely as camouflage for a campaign to "anoint Chalabi." The officials hostile to Chalabi viewed others who did not share their hostility as dangerous, pro-Chalabi partisans. (p. 242)

Anti-Chalabi officials—those intent on blocking him from ever exercising political power in Iraq—found it useful to claim that their bureaucratic rivals (notably Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and I) were trying to "anoint" Chalabi as leader of Iraq after Saddam.  (p. 254)

It is significant, however, that the two individuals who led the U.S. effort to create political structures for post-Saddam Iraq have never claimed that they were asked to "anoint" or favor Chalabi. . . . That neither Garner nor Bremer was ever asked to help Chalabi, let alone "anoint" him as leader of Iraq, should dispose of the allegation that the Pentagon's leadership team was working on a pro-Chalabi plot. If Garner and Bremer were not in on such a plot—and never saw one—then there was none. (p. 255)

Related Documents:

Interview with General Jay Garner, Frontline, July 17, 2003.