Cambridge Forecast Group Blog

The Man Who Pushed America

to War: The Extraordinary

Life, Adventures and Obsessions of

Ahmad Chalabi

Aram Roston (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

From an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter–an explosive biography that tells the untold story of the man most responsible for the war in Iraq.

Ahmad Chalabi literally changed the world. If anyone were to get the most credit for pushing the United States to war in Iraq, Chalabi, a wealthy exile who spent most of his life out of Iraq, would certainly be a leading contender.

A convicted felon and a fugitive from justice in Jordan, Chalabi managed to charm and influence the top leaders of the United States. Those leaders gave him United States government money, which he would, in turn, use to lobby them. He then rode America’s immense power, harnessing it to his interests. More so than President George W. Bush or Vice President Richard Cheney, Chalabi and his followers steered the United States toward its fateful position in Iraq.

This is an extraordinary investigative biography, by a brilliant young Emmy award-winning journalist who works for NBC’s Investigative Unit, telling the story of Chalabi as a gifted MIT mathematician, to his misadventures in the Middle East, to the invasion of Iraq, which he himself took part in the most theatrical way, posing in the desert with a rag-tag army of Iraqis.

About the Author
Aram Roston is a journalist who has covered Iraq, Chalabi, and the reconstruction of Iraq for NBC “Nightly News.” An award-winning investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C., he has also written for GQ, Mother Jones, the New York Times Magazine, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Maclean’s, and the Walrus. He has reported internationally from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Liberia. This is his first book.

Product Details: Hardcover: 369 pages Publisher: Nation Books (March 3, 2008) Language: English ISBN-10: 1568583532 ISBN-13: 978-1568583532

Marc Zell Douglas Feith & Chalabi Family

L. Marc Zell (born February 24, 1953) is a Washington, DC born attorney, currently based in Israel.

Graduated with an AB from Princeton University (1974) in Germanic Languages and Literatures with a concentration in theoretical linguistics and a JD with honors from University of Maryland at Baltimore (1977). After clerking at the Maryland Court of Appeals for a year (1977-1978), Zell joined Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Kampelman as an associate (1978-1981).

In 1986 he formed the law firm Feith & Zell, P.C. with Douglas Feith, who served later as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001-2005.

In the 1980s Zell developed an interest in Zionism and after a series of visits to Israel, moved his family to the Jewish settlement Alon Shevut in the West Bank in 1988. [1]

After Douglas Feith left law practice to work at the Pentagon in 2001, Zell partnered with Bernel Goldberg to form Zell, Goldberg & Co with offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and affiliate offices in Washington, DC, Russia and Europe.

In 2003 he joined the Iraqi International Law Group, the first international law firm in Iraq since the founding of the Republic, as Partner for International Marketing. [2][3]

Iraqi International Law Group (IILG)

IILG is surprisingly modest about the family connections of its founder, Salem Chalabi. The website doesn’t mention that he is a nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, who just happened to be the leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), a member of the governing council and one-time president of Iraq. Uncle Ahmed, a former banker in Jordan, fled the country in 1989 before he could be arrested in connection with a $200 million financial scandal. He was later tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.

Ahmed Chalabi found strong support in the Pentagon and US Congress, which generously provided funds in support of his opposition to Saddam Hussein through the INC.

One of Ahmed Chalabi’s staunchest supporters in Washington is Douglas Feith, a former lawyer who was third in the Pentagon pecking order. The pair worked closely together in the run-up to war, with Chalabi providing “intelligence” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (much of which proved to be wrong) and boasting that he had a secret network inside Iraq which could be harnessed to help run the country once the US invaded.

In the event, the network did not materialise and consequently, Feith and Chalabi share a large part of the blame for the present mess.

Feith, meanwhile, has close links to the Israeli Likud party and the country’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. He was one of the authors of the famous Clean Break document, published in 1996, which proposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the first step towards reshaping Israel’s “strategic environment” in the Middle East

Feith has also argued that Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land are lawful – contrary to the overwhelming majority of legal opinion around the world – and has latterly been promoting the idea of supplying Iraqi oil to Israel via a pipeline.

Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew, Salem, was a peripheral figure in the political machinations over Iraq.

Shortly before the war, Salem Chalabi took part in a conference on bringing democracy to Iraq and pushed for a post-war truth and reconciliation commission on the South African model.

Later, during the invasion, the Pentagon sought to appoint him as adviser to the ministry of justice, working in Jay Garner’s ill-fated project to take over the administration of Iraq.

Salem’s dynamic new law firm is currently operating from suites 1632-1634 of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. This, according to the website, is a temporary arrangement “while we renovate and restore our permanent office building in the centrally situated Harthiyya district”.

Although none of the “largest corporations and institutions on the planet” have yet identified themselves as Salem Chalabi’s clients, IILG appears to be part of a carefully-constructed network aimed at channelling business into Iraq.

Interestingly, the firm’s website is not registered in Salem Chalabi’s name but in the name of Marc Zell, whose address is given as Suite 716, 1800 K Street, Washington. That is the address of the Washington office of Zell, Goldberg &Co, which claims to be “one of Israel’s fastest-growing business-oriented law firms”, and the related FANDZ International Law Group.

The unusual name “FANDZ” was concocted from “F and Z”, the Z being Marc Zell and the F being Douglas Feith. The two men were law partners until 2001, when Feith took up his Pentagon post as undersecretary of defence for policy.

According to Salem Chalabi, quoted in the National Journal, Mr Zell is IILG’s “marketing consultant” and has been contacting US law firms in Washington and New York to ask if they have clients interested in doing business in Iraq.

This ties in with a announcements by Zell, Goldberg & Co that it set up a “task force” dealing with issues and opportunities relating to the “recently ended” war in Iraq.

One of its activities, the announcement said, was to assist US companies “in their relations with the United States government in connection with Iraqi reconstruction projects as prime contractors and consultants”.

Zell Goldberg & Co made no mention of a connection with Salem Chalabi or IILG in Iraq, but said it was working in the US with the Federal Market Group. This organisation – whose website is adorned with a “God bless America” logo – specialises in helping companies to win US government contracts and claims a 90 per cent success rate. With friends like these, it will not be surprising to find Salem Chalabi moving out of the Palestine Hotel and into his newly restored headquarters in Harthiyya district sooner than expected.

The neocon idea represented by Feith was to “mayhemize” the Middle East with Iraq as the “sweet spot” in this neocon/Zionist engineered turmoil.

The Chalabis would gain wealth and power and would recognize Israel, and construct a Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline.

Feith’s “other Chalabi” was to be Manucher Ghorbanifar from Iran, a global supercrook.

Thus Feith and Zell and the neocons were looking for a “trifecta” where Israel and wealth and power would be fused as Richard Perle and the other American Israeli agents have been doing for decades.