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Who did Ahmad Chalabi piss off? Paul Bremer, the New York Sun's Eli Lake reports, in a piece today pushing the line that Chalabi's oil-for-food investigation would have contained uncomfortable revelations about how Bremer had managed Iraq's post-war Iraqi oil revenue fund. [He seems to be getting some push-back from his sources.] Lakhdar Brahimi, says Slate's Fred Kaplan; it is to the UN's Brahimi of course that the Bush White House has turned in desperation to coordinate Iraq's political transition, and indeed, that transition plan has become the main talking point for Bush's Iraq exit strategy (and his own reelection hopes). But it is deep in Kaplan's piece that I think the turning point, the really key player Chalabi pissed off, may be revealed:
The crucial rupture took place last month, when Chalabi started actively resisting Bush's plan for transferring sovereignty to Iraq on June 30. A central element of this plan is to turn the transition planning over to the United Nations' envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi. Such a move threw off Chalabi. Brahimi has turned out to be Chalabi's most formidable rival...
The problem is that Bush, who once heaved contempt on the United Nations, now realizes that Brahimi is his only hope for an exit strategy or a coherent Iraqi strategy of any sort—which he desperately needs before the November election. Chalabi's hostility to Brahimi is, in Bush's eyes, hostility to Bush...With Bush grinding his teeth, the Pentagon's neocons had to surrender. Last month, the National Security Council decided to cut ties with Chalabi, according to the current Time. His allowance was pulled a few weeks later.
The person who Chalabi crossed too far may very well be the White House envoy to Iraq who has spent the past three months working with Brahimi and sipping tea with Sistani and Kurds and Adnan Pachachi in the hopes of salvaging some sort of US exit strategy from Iraq, Robert Blackwill. Condaleezza Rice's former boss at the Bush I National Security Council. A man with (trust me) a limited amount of patience. And who, unlike Brahimi, or even Bremer I suspect, was regularly in direct daily phone contact with Rice, and via her, the president.
As far as I can tell, the decisive rupture for Chalabi came not because the State Departmant and CIA were becoming more powerful in the Green Zone at the expense of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, or that Chalabi refused to turn over the oil for food documents to Bremer, or that Karl Rove is trying to send a message to the neocons, or even that the Iraqis were investigating alleged massive corruption by the INC in the Finance Ministry, de-Ba'athification program, the currency transition, etc. [all true]. The decisive rupture of course was when the White House decided to cut Chalabi off. When the President of the United States and his entourage decided to cut Chalabi off. Back in mid-April. [Seemingly before King Abdullah of Jordan came May 5 with any sort of intelligence dossier on Chalabi.]
Now how does this fit with the Iran espionage charges? I suspect that there has been a long time US counterintelligence investigation of Chalabi and crew involving Iran, but that it had been moving along on a separate track from the Chalabi-is-a-pest track, below the radar of the White House, until the two tracks had a reason to converge, seemingly in April. [Perhaps in the person of Robert Blackwill.] I don't think, like Ledeen, that we can dismiss the Iran espionage charges as purely politicized. Why? Because it's pretty clear that Chalabi's intel chief Aras Habib Karim has split to Iran for a reason, and that the US intelligence community has a lot of reason to believe he is truly a long time on-the-payroll spy for Iran. His position heading the DIA-led Information Collection Program in Iraq had two DIA officials working in his very office, and a source familiar with the set up tells me the intel sharing in such a setting is certainly two-ways. It truly seems like an Iranian spy was heading up a joint US-INC intel shop in Baghdad for much of the past year. [Just think for a moment about how compromising such a scenario presents in and of itself.] What's more, it's clear that there had been a much longer relationship that involved regular sharing of sensitive information between high and mid level Pentagon civilians and intelligence and military staffers assigned to the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the INC's Aras Habib Karim and Chalabi. Even after it became obvious in the wake of the war and the failed hunt for Iraq's WMD that what the two had fed the OSD and the Office of the Vice President was all lies, paid for by $33 million American taxdollars. Still, Wolfowitz and Feith kept Chalabi's crew on the payroll, and put Karim in an even more sensitive position, working in the very same offices with DIA personnel reporting back to the Pentagon and DIA, on matters including US force protection in Iraq. Stepping back, it's hard to understand how any serious person could not be sobered up by the gravity of the Iran espionage charges involving Aras Habib Karim, and trying to assess how much such a set up potentially threatens the lives of US troops and compromises US operations in Iraq.