Chalabi at the Sun
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When the deputy prime minister of a Free Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, stopped by our offices late Friday, we invited him to take a seat in front of the portrait of the editor who built the Sun, Charles A. Dana. For it turns out that Dana, who bought the Sun after riding with U.S. Grant to preserve the Union, had great sympathy for those foreigners who aspired to democracy in their own lands and looked to America for inspiration and backing. Dana had taken a particular liking to the Cuban patriot Jose Marti, who for part of his struggle for Cuba Libre operated from a desk in the newsroom of the Sun over on Broadway. Watching Mr. Chalabi across the editorial table, we couldn’t help thinking that Dana would have had a similar admiration for Mr. Chalabi and his cause.
We’d first met him in 1998 at a dinner with Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, who, as a visionary editor in the mold of Dana, recognized early where Mr. Chalabi was going. On Friday, Mr. Chalabi had just come from Washington, where his meetings included substantive discussions with Condoleezza Rice, who heads a state department where Mr. Chalabi was once persona non grata, a department which, until President Bush put his own person at the helm of it, had, like the CIA, done so much to undermine Mr. Chalabi and to stymie his rise to power. The Iraqi leader was also buoyed by his meeting, here in New York, with the Council on Foreign Relations, whose magazine, Foreign Affairs, has contributed to the sneering at Mr. Chalabi that has emanated from the foreign policy establishment.
At every stop Mr. Chalabi found himself given a friendly reception and engaged in serious discussions. No doubt that is a reflection of the transformative power of democracy, even a democracy springing from heretofore arid soil. Mr. Chalabi, of whom the foreign affairs columnist of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, once boasted he’d never made the acquaintance, today is one of the highest ranking freely elected figures in the Middle East. Yet even today, the New York Times continues to deride Mr. Chalabi and his movement. Its editorial last week, calling Mr. Chalabi a “multiply discredited schemer,” is one of the most disgraceful it has ever published. It prompted us to go back to see what the Times said about Jose Marti.
Well, it turns out that the Times was full of derision for Marti, too. On June 1, 1895, after Marti died heroically in battle, the Times issued a dispatch from its special correspondent in Havana, under the headline “Impression of Marti’s Death.” It mocked him as the “so-called President of the Cuban Republic,” saying he’d prepared the revolution “in spite of the little aid which he could find in Cuba every time he had attempted to create a revolutionary movement.” It called him a “commonplace poet and writer, a prolix orator of diffuse style…” The separatists, it sneered,”lacking a chief having any prestige at all, gave him their money.”
The Times conceded that it would be “unjust to deny” that Marti “had remarkable tenacity, activity, and perseverance. Perhaps he was also a man of conviction, as his friends assure.” But it said that “he must be severely judged.” Complained the Times: “To put into turbulence a country which asked for nothing but peace and work, to expose it to a ferocious race, thinking always of revenge against the whites, to light the fires of civil war, pillage under the pretext of ‘Cuba libre,’ and put obstacles in the way of reforms which had been demanded for years, are not acts that claim indulgence.” It went on to gripe of Marti: “To sustain the revolution he had recourse to all sorts of means: lies, false news, calumny.”
Well, if that sounds like some early version of Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd, let us remember history has a way of playing tricks on us all. Marti is now acclaimed the world over as a hero in the struggle for freedom. Our own lengthening span in newspaper work has given us ample chance to observe that democrats in exile face all sorts of indignities. Mr. Chalabi suffered his with humor, grace, grit, and sagacity. It was just wonderful to see him now in a moment of triumph, to hear him articulate his appreciation of America and the sacrifices Americans have made to help his country, to see that he is a man without bitterness, and to hear that he is not asking for more G.I.s but for support for his nation’s sovereignty, proud of his constitution, looking forward to the next elections, and warming to the business of government at home and abroad. We’re only sad that Charles Dana – and, for that matter, Bob Bartley – couldn’t have been there in person.