The man alleged to have provided WMD intel that led to the Iraq War, Ahmed Chalabi, has died

Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi was instrumental in bringing about the US intervention in Iraq in 2003. 

He passed away at his home in Baghdad Tuesday at the age of 71.

“Basically,” says correspondent Jane Arraf, “Ahmed Chalabi managed to persuade an American government — which was not difficult to persuade, mind you, that there were credible links between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.”

Arraf met and interviewed Chalabi on numerous occasions, from the time in the run-up to the war, right through to once late last year. That was his last major interview with a Western journalist.

“If you fast forward a few years, he has on every occasion denied that he pushed the Americans into it,” says Arraf. “What he has said, essentially, is that he introduced them to intelligence assets, if you will, and it was up to them to figure out who to believe. But what he did say was that the main thing he did was he made the Iraq issue an American political issue. And if you go back before 2003, that really was the extraordinary thing. He managed — he was very influential — in passing a bill essentially that said US policy was to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democratically elected government. And that’s essentially what provided the legal basis, in American terms, for everything that came afterward.”

Asked if US veterans should be angry with Chalabi, Arraf said “there’s such a long list of people one should be angry with about Iraq.”

One thing to remember, points out Arraf, is that “he persuaded the Americans to act, but nobody could have forced him to act. And he wasn’t the only one persuading them to act. But yes, there’s a lot of anger at him. There’s a lot of anger to go around. And he does indisputably share part of the responsibility for the invasion. He never disputed that. What he did was essentially lay the groundwork for the Americans to do both what he wanted, and the Americans wanted, he said.”

“But,” continues Arraf, “what came after, he said, was where it went wrong — both in terms of the Americans staying when they should have left; in terms of the Americans taking over the running of Iraq for the first few years. And also in terms of what has happened to Iraq since the Americans left. The story did not end the way that Ahmed Chalabi thought it would, or wished it would have, when he was first talking to the Americans.”