The struggle for factional power in a liberated Iraq is moving into high gear as the invasion draws near. One dynamic that’s in high tension right now pits the White House against the CIA and the State Department on the democratic nature of the new government. Some of this comes out in an article in The Observer:
Chalabi, who lives in London, said demonstrators who attended anti-war protests across Britain yesterday were misguided. ‘I would urge them to think again,’ he said.
‘War is a horrible thing to wish on anyone. But I firmly believe that the Iraqi people want the US to get rid of Saddam. Blair is doing the right thing.’Chalabi was especially scathing of the German government, which he said was led by ‘ageing German leftists wishing to absolve their conscience at the expense of the Iraqi people’. It was Germany which had supplied Saddam with chemical weapons in the 1980s, he pointed out.
The Pentagon and the vice-president Dick Cheney are broadly in favour of introducing Western-style democracy to Iraq but the State Department under Colin Powell and the CIA believe it could have a destabilising influence on the region.
Chalabi has long been at odds with the CIA, who’ve disregarded 100 of his reports on Iraqi linkage with Al Qaeda which clashed with their view that religious zealots could never cooperate with secular fascists against America. Chalabi has made the CIA look bad, and they want to punish him by installing a Saudi-style government in Iraq. While I’m certainly in no position to say how this will work out in the end, it’s important to realize that the factional power struggles and the debate over the new government isn’t dampening the Chalabi-lead INC’s enthusiasm for regime change.