Chalabi's AEI supporters have taken to the media in the days since the US-Iraqi raid on Chalabi's Baghdad compound, to try to put out the message that Chalabi is a victim of a smear campaign led by an incompetent CIA that has much to be defensive about. But the real target of the neocon defense of Chalabi is not American public opinion so much as the neocons' own former supporters in the Bush administration. They are deeply stung, I am told, by recent events, that reflect how unwelcome their own positions have become in the upper reaches and the bureaucracy of the Bush administration.

Today the New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller reports on Richard Perle, Jim Woolsey, Danielle Pletka, Newt Gingrich, and other Chalabi supporters mostly from AEI making a pilgrimage to the offices of Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley last Saturday, to try to get the White House to reverse course. Rice, in typical fashion, conceded nothing, apparently.

Ms. Rice told them she appreciated that they had made their views known. But she gave no hint of her own opinion, participants said, and made no concessions to their point of view.

The neocons' real angst, the real tension, as has been noted many places including here before, is not between those who long mistrusted Chalabi at the CIA and State Department, and those who have long championd his virtues, such as Richard Perle and Jim Woolsey. The real tension is between those neocons out of government who have long championed Chalabi's virtues, such as Perle, Woolsey, Ledeen, and Pletka, and those inside of government who once supported Chalabi but for the past month and a half have gone on silent about him. Word is that those who have seen what Chalabi is accused of doing, which is limited to those with the security clearance and need to know, including Feith, Wolfowiz, Cheney and their senior staff, can't distance themselves quickly enough from Chalabi.

As Bumiller writes:

Although Mr. Chalabi's supporters outside the administration have been caustic in their comments about his treatment, there has been relative silence so far from Mr. Chalabi's supporters within the administration. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who favored going to war in Iraq and was a patron of Mr. Chalabi, did not respond to numerous requests this week for an interview.

Mr. Wolfowitz's spokesman, Charley Cooper, said in an e-mail message that Mr. Wolfowitz believed that Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress "have provided valuable operational intelligence to our military forces in Iraq, which has helped save American lives." Mr. Cooper added in the message that "Secretary Wolfowitz hopes that the events of the last few weeks haven't undermined that."

The current views of Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, are not known. Both strongly supported Mr. Chalabi before and during the war in Iraq.

I am also intrigued by the Weekly Standard's reluctance so far to weigh in on the Chalabi matter. As the magazine's being leaked Doug Feith's classified memo to the Senate Select Intelligence committee on the alleged connections between Hussein and Al Qaeda last August suggests, the Standard apparently has excellent sources inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. I suspect they are being told that what Chalabi is accused of doing is deadly serious. [update: a friend says the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol has never been a fan of Chalabi, or the concept Chalabi and his supporters tried to promote that the US should just aggressively back the INC and perhaps provide it with a little airpower to unseat Hussein.]

What's more, I am told that prominent elements of the pro-Israel contingent in Washington are also persuaded that Chalabi is someone dangerous to US and Israel's national interests. I can only wonder if the relationship between Mossad and the Likud is as hostile as the one between the US's neocons and the CIA. But I am told Mossad hates Chalabi.

One really wonders if the neocons, who are being so cleaved by recent events, will survive as a cohesive ideological movement after this. This seems to me to be shaping up to be one of the decisive turning points for the movement as a whole, similar to during the Carter administration, when many neocon Democrats, like Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick and Perle, frustrated with what they perceived to be Carter's weak foreign policy towards the Soviet Union, ultimately abandoned him for the Republican party and Reagan.

Even if Bush is reelected next fall, the neocons are sure to play a far less influential role in foreign policy. And if Bush loses, the neocons and their Iraq/Middle East project are certain to be perceived to be one of the main reasons. How will they write the history of what went wrong? And why their ideas failed, in Iraq? Who will they blame for the failure? From the gist of the columns and interviews so far, everyone but themselves. Isn't that what they are always accusing Middle Easterners of doing? Blaming all their failures on somebody else?

UPDATE: A colleague has some interesting thoughts, not on the neocons' fall from power, but on the forces that brought them to power in the first place.

He asks, why did the neocons come to power in the Bush II administration, and the Sharon government come to power in Israel? Intelligence failure. And the perception in both countries that their national security establishments, the CIA, and the Mossad/Shin Bet, were discredited by their failure to predict or prevent the second intifadah and the 9/11 terror attacks. Discredited was not just their failure to foresee the attacks, but the very basis for their counter terror strategies: working with the current leadership in the Palestinian Authority and Middle Eastern states, accepting a large degree of status quo, etc. The pragmatic, realist approach.

Now that the neocons' grand strategy for the US defeating the increasingly unstable political order it helped create in the Middle East has seemingly been discredited as well, at least in implementation if not as an idea, what will the future template for regime change and democratization look like?

How about one the Clinton administration successfully achieved in Serbia: aggressively (and peacefully) backing the student group Otpor and its correllary in other tyrannies, not with weapons, but with the lessons in strategic nonviolence and overthrowing dictatorships taught by Harvard scholar Gene Sharp? I got to witness that revolution, which was a thrilling thing, and even more so because it was achieved by Serbian people themselves, not by NATO or the CIA.

The Vulcans believed the US military was the tool to achieve their foreign policy goals. But maybe what was wrong was not their goals but their chosen means of achieving them.

Posted by Laura at May 29, 2004 09:58 AM