What is Christopher Hitchens' relationship with Ahmed Chalabi?

[BurtWorm]

From this mini review of Woodward's new book, I'd guess it's cushy somehow. Does anyone know?

http://slate.msn.com/id/2099888/


There it is in black and white in Bob Woodward's book, and we can be pretty sure that it's accurate, because we know that Colin Powell likes to talk to the composer of the first draft of blah. The secretary of state is quoted as saying that he often thinks our biggest problem in Iraq is Ahmad Chalabi. Just take a moment to roll that thought around your own cranium. Iraq ? mass murder, looted economy, mass trauma, incipient warlordism, devastated ecology, foreign infiltrators, crazed mullahs ? .you become a bit spoiled for choice when you select a main problem here. Picking Chalabi is presumably easier than picking a fight with Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or even Bush.

It's a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet. Since then he has called for an earlier transfer of sovereignty, earlier elections, and a sterner line on de-Baathification than the patrons of Abu Ghraib would like. He's said and done some other things that I'm not so sure about, and I don't know what happened in the Jordanian banking system many decades ago (and neither, dear reader, do you). But he's not a puppet, and anyone who thinks he is the problem is probably readying some puppets of his own whom you don't want to think about. Here one might also mention George Tenet's CIA, which doesn't have many recent successes to its credit, either in defending the homeland or in guessing right about enemies overseas, but which seems to have agents to spare to defame the Iraqi National Congress. Unpunished enemies, protected torturers, and punished friends ? not a great week for the good old cause of regime change.

[bedtimeforbonzo]

1. I think that Chalabi

gets to be on top

[BurtWorm]

2. I wouldn't be too sure.

;) Good answer though.