Word: chalabied
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...Israeli politics makes them hostile to any effort in Washington to balance U.S. foreign policy between support for Israel and recognition of Arab interests. Gingrich and his pals in and around the Pentagon, like Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz want to turn Iraq over to Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled banker (or swindler, according to the Jordanian courts) whom they have cultivated in their own image as a leader that would toe the U.S. line and embrace Israel. The crime of the "Arabists" has been to warn that a figure like Chalabi is likely to draw more opposition than...
...hawkish civilians in charge of the Pentagon have clashed bitterly with the State Department over plans for a post-Saddam Iraq. The Pentagon civilians have pushed hard for the U.S. to hand over power to a provisional government headed up by their favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, whom they emphasize is in tune with the President's wider Mideast agenda. A U.S. official traveling with Chalabi in Iraq last week told TIME that the INC leader was "the only one" who could create a viable secular democratic government in Iraq...
...State Department and CIA, as well as key U.S. allies ranging from Britain to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, don't share the Pentagon's enthusiasm for Chalabi. They question whether a man who has spent the past 45 years in exile from Iraq has any standing among Iraqis, and point to his conviction for bank fraud in Jordan a decade ago to question the appropriateness of backing him. The Pentagon may have hoped to seal the debate by flying in Chalabi and some 700 of his U.S.-trained militiamen in the last week of the war, but the "facts...
Back in Washington, the Pentagon has been grooming some useful backup for Chalabi. Two subway stops from downtown, upstairs from a McDonald's, are the offices of the seven-week-old Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council. A pet project of Wolfowitz's, the organization consists of a group of exiled Iraqi technocrats sympathetic to Chalabi who have been feverishly planning how to restart everything from irrigation to trash collection to oil production as soon as the fighting stops. When they get the word from Garner, they will deploy as liaisons between his temporary American ministers and those Iraqis deemed salvageable...
None of this guarantees that Chalabi will emerge at the top. Several U.S. officials say they hope to institute a rule that those who serve on the I.I.A. cannot run for office in the first elections. In the end, the Defense Department, according to a senior aide to Rumsfeld, is more interested in leaving Iraq quickly than in picking its future leaders. "There will be people with credible claims to be able to lead various parts of the country," he says, "and our view is, Great, let them sort that out." Sorting out Iraq's fractious polity will challenge...