The New York Sun September 23, 2003 Editorial Chalabi's Progress Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the governing council in Iraq, is in town for a few days, and the usual State Department apologists have been out in force warning people not to listen to him. One of them, David L. Phillips of the Council on Foreign Relations, issued a long diatribe last week suggesting that the problems in stabilizing the situation in Iraq stem from civilians at the Pentagon relying too much on the advice of Mr. Chalabi. In fact, the problems stem precisely from the fact that the State Department and the CIA spurned what Mr. Chalabi had been saying from the earliest stages of the debate on the war - including, incidentally, what he had been saying in an interview in the first issue of The New York Sun.His remarks then appeared under a headline saying "Free Iraqi Leader Warns of 'Abysmal' Planning" and calling for an urgent start to the planning for a transition to democracy.The date of that cri de coeur was a full year before the war.
If all the sniping at the democratic government in formation is dimming Mr. Chalabi's spirits, it certainly wasn't evident during his dinner last night with editors of The New York Sun. He is due, in his capacity as interim president of Iraq, to make an appearance at the United Nations on October 2. And he has been invited by senior senators in Washington to make an appearance on Capitol Hill.They will find him full of concern, even anger, over the security situation in the country. But the frustration at the Americans is as nothing compared with the hatred that is seething in Iraq for the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and those who supported it or apologized for it. Mr. Chalabi puts the security situation at the top of his list,reiterating that the public in America underestimates the financing and strength of Saddam's resources in parts of Iraq. Mr.Chalabi, nonetheless, is full of enthusiasm for new legislation being promulgated by the governing council in Baghdad. It includes an important law on lustration, designed to force Baathists to identify themselves and blocking their participation in the public sector. Legislation being put into effect includes measures limiting taxation to 15%, capping import tariffs at 5%, and protecting the right of direct foreign investors to take a 100% interest in an Iraqi company. Mr. Chalabi, a University of Chicago-educated mathematician, comprehends that limits on direct foreign investment have strangled this important inflow of development capital into the Arab world. And when one sits down with him at dinner, he quickly demonstrates an extraordinary knowledge of the earlier models, such as that which Ludwig Erhard put into place in the free half of Germany, setting the stage of the western victory in the Cold War. As for the United Nations, the president of the national council will offer little in the way of support for those who suggest his position is similar to that of France, whose proposals are designed to obstruct American access in the region. His position is that sovereignty ought to devolve to the Iraqis as soon as possible. This is all part of a broad,strategic vision for Iraq that he has been articulating since the days when he was encouraging Congress to pass what became the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Now that the opportunity is at hand,he is recommending against intermediate steps involving the United Nations. His position is at odds with that of the Bush administration at the moment, but he is not anti-American. He says the first act of a sovereign Iraqi government would be to ask the Americans to stay, not as occupiers but as treaty allies in the struggle to secure the Iraqi population.
