Writing through the rubble

Over the years, Chalabi's network of neoconservative friends opened doors for him in many ways. In 1998, when Chalabi was on the outs with the CIA and looking for funding, Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode introduced him to Max Singer, an ardent pro-Israel conservative who wrote a paper based on Chalabi's theories of democratic power in the Middle East and tried, at Chalabi's urging, to vouch for him to the Israeli government. In the end, the Mossad didn't bite, but "it attests to the impressive breadth of Chalabi's allure" that a U.S. Defense Department official would try to broker such a deal when his own government wasn't interested. In that same year, conservative legislative aide Stephen Rademaker, heavily influenced by Chalabi, drafted a law to make regime change in Iraq U.S. policy. "The U.S. congress passed a law written largely to achieve his vision and to boost the fortune of his political vehicle, the Iraqi National Congress," Roston writes. Later, some of the funds attached to that law would of course flow into Chalabi's coffers.

After Sept. 11, when neoconservatives were well placed in the White House, Chalabi didn't even have to lobby for his agenda. For example, Stephen Hadley, then deputy National Security Advisor, formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a bogus nonprofit created as a vehicle for promoting regime change and the INC. "It was a remarkable move by the Bush administration," says Roston, "to invent a nongovernmental organization to push its policy."

In the end, Chalabi did get his invasion -- although the occupation dashed his plans of being immediately installed as the head of a U.S. backed "democratic" regime. But even though Chalabi's fingerprints were all over it, it was America's war, and this country bears all the responsibility. Still, it is sobering to contemplate the central role of one individual, who was not an American citizen and who presided over a corrupt, if not criminal, financial empire that went down in ruins, in this catastrophic event. Roston estimates that Chalabi and his party received more than $59 million from U.S. intelligence agencies in exchange for "his organizing skills, his propaganda, and a handful of false intelligence bits." As with his banks, Chalabi's U.S. funded operations were run pretty much off the books. The central question raised by Roston's book, and why it's essential reading for understanding this tragic period in our history, is not how could one man have so much power, but how our vastly powerful democratic nation could have acted so ineffectually and deceitfully. -- Jeanne Carstensen

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"Mission Accomplished: The Experts Speak, or How We Won the War in Iraq," by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky

In some ways the Iraq war feels like a relic of a bygone era. People are still dying, America's prestige and treasure continue to bleed into the sand, but the war has somehow become less newsworthy. It has migrated toward the back of the A section as the front pages fill up with headlines about Clinton, Obama and McCain. People apparently no longer want to hear about the war; they'd rather read about who will replace the war's author.

"Mission Accomplished" feels, at first, like the same kind of musty echo. Cerf and Navasky have assembled 200 pages of direct quotes from the "experts" who brought us the war, a mordant collection of the most hubristic, deluded, deceitful and plain wrong statements about Iraq ever made by Bush administration officials and their enablers. All the golden oldies are here, from the title of the book itself to Rumsfeld's "freedom is untidy" to Kenneth Adelman's prediction that the war would be a "walk in the park" to Cheney and McCain's prediction that the Iraqis would greet us as "liberators." Cerf and Navasky have also dug up a few forgotten and worthy B-sides, like former White House speechwriter David Frum's creepy assertion that "This 'rush to war' should really be seen as the ultimate 'rush to peace.'"

It's an upper-middle-brow bathroom book, full of a species of overly familiar and tragicomic one-liners. Readers may wish to do Sudoku puzzles instead of wallowing in memories of Ari Fleischer and WMDs. But readers who opt for "Mission Accomplished" may find that it pins them to their, um, seats. You can read it for the requisite five minutes, or 50. And should you linger, and find yourself borne back into the past, remembering what it was like to listen, helplessly, to the cheerleading, to cringe as a supposed liberal like Alan Colmes asked, "Should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?" you will also remember the alarm and outrage that ensued. You may turn past the front pages of the paper again, and notice that people are still saying things like this. Many of the book's quotes are of quite recent vintage, like "Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud," uttered by conservative commentator Deroy Murdock on Nov. 7, 2007. Still other bons mots will have to wait for the next edition, like those from one of George Bush's potential successors, who claims, repeatedly, that Iran is helping al-Qaida in Iraq. -- Mark Schone

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