Word: chalabi
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...Ahmed Chalabi, a 54-year-old Iraqi businessman, has lived in exile for 26 years, but he keeps dreaming the same dream: as leader of the opposition to Saddam Hussein, he will persuade Washington to designate large swaths of Iraq as no-fly/no- drive zones, where U.S. air power will shelter a nascent anti-Saddam revolution. Inside these enclaves, Chalabi will build a guerrilla force financed by "liberated" Iraqi oil. One day, under the protection of U.S. warplanes, 10,000 fighters will march on Baghdad, slicing away pieces of Saddam's territory as their offensives persuade demoralized Iraqi army...
General Anthony Zinni, the four-star who leads the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf, spent months among dissidents in northern Iraq after the 1991 war, and is paid to judge such things. He has a recurrent nightmare: What if the U.S. fell in with schemes like Chalabi's? Privately he thinks they're "harebrained," and he doesn't warm to such notions in public either. "I've heard of schemes where people are saying, 'Create an enclave, guarantee air support,'" he sighs. "Those are the kinds of things we have to be very careful of." Yes, President Clinton signed...
...Even as an elated Chalabi declared, "We can do it!," much of Washington scoffed. "Nobody around here is naive," acknowledged a Clinton aide involved in the effort. "There's no easy way either to directly oust him or to create an opposition group that over time can do it." In fact, say military analysts, the liberation law is a fine symbol to show that the U.S. stands with the people of Iraq against Saddam, but it is hardly a blueprint for his demise...
...every shade of opinion and ethnic coloration, including Islamists with Shi'ite and Sunni subdivisions, Kurd separatists, Arab nationalists, communists and liberal democrats. Their only common goal is to depose Saddam, but after that come conflicting agendas. The most robust of the groups, at least in p.r. terms, is Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. The I.N.C. once united nearly two-dozen factions and earned support from Washington, but it has fallen on hard times. Internal feuds and well-publicized failures have melted its credibility. Another group, the Amman-based Iraqi National Accord, tries to cultivate dissent inside the Iraqi army...
Such mixed signals, Chalabi believes, caused fatal disillusionment and dissension. In the month before Saddam's assault, the Kurdistan Democratic Party wrote four letters to State Department and National Security Council officials asking Washington to condemn an Iranian incursion and attacks by a Kurdish rival faction. In its final missive, the K.D.P. warned of the "only option" left: turning to Saddam...