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Stunning story on Chalabi at Salon. Doug Feith's former law partner Mark Zell, who's been a business partner of Chalabi's nephew Salem Chalbi, now has only the harshest words for him:
Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat," says L. Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith, now the undersecretary of defense for policy, and a former friend and supporter of Chalabi and his aspirations to lead Iraq. "He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another." While Zell's disaffection with Chalabi has been a long time in the making, his remarks to Salon represent his first public break with the would-be Iraqi leader, and are likely to ripple throughout Washington in the days to come.
Zell, a Jerusalem attorney, continues to be a partner in the firm that Feith left in 2001 to take the Pentagon job. He also helped Ahmed Chalabi's nephew Salem set up a new law office in Baghdad in late 2003. Chalabi met with Zell and other neoconservatives many times from the mid-1990s on in London, Turkey, and the U.S. Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.
What's turned Zell? Chalabi's reputed long ties with Iran, and post-war dissing of Israel.
[This piece says Doug Feith will resign by mid-May. Hope to learn more about this when Feith speaks Tuesday at AEI].
Post-Script. This piece is brilliantly investigated, and makes one ill. The neocons in policy positions [Feith, Wolfowitz, Perle] have to go to jail. They willfully deceived the American public, perhaps even the president, and they allowed themselves to be deceived by the kind of two-bit con artist you or I wouldn't buy a car from. Why did some of my smartest friends subscribe to their baloney for so long? And what do they have to say for themselves now? It just goes to prove that intelligence and intellectual ability have nothing to do with good sense.
What to do with Chalabi is easily answered: a one-way ticket to Jordan, where he will face prison for the rest of his sorry life.