Politics & Power Quote by Ahmed Chalabi

Chalabi is selling inevitability as morality. “War of national liberation” is a phrase with revolutionary perfume: it frames invasion as emancipation, not conquest, and preemptively drafts civilians into the role of grateful protagonists. It’s also strategic ambiguity. Liberation from whom, by whom, and at what price are left conveniently unanswered, because the power of the phrase is its borrowed legitimacy from anti-colonial struggles. It invites the listener to hear Iraq as Poland, Algeria, or South Africa rather than a sovereign state about to be remade by outside force.

The second sentence is the tell: “We believe the people reject totalitarianism.” The hedge (“we believe”) does two jobs at once. It shields the speaker from accountability if reality disappoints, and it offers policymakers the comforting fiction that political outcomes are simply waiting to be unlocked. “The people” is an elastic stand-in for actual constituencies, factions, and sectarian histories; it turns complicated publics into a single democratic yearning. “Totalitarianism” is less a diagnosis than a trigger word, designed for post-Cold War ears trained to treat that label as an automatic moral veto.

Context matters because Chalabi wasn’t merely forecasting a popular uprising; he was lobbying for one. As an Iraqi exile with deep ties to Washington in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War, his rhetoric functions like a bridge between American interventionist language and Iraqi nationalist desire. The subtext: if you act, history will applaud; if things go wrong, blame the “totalitarians,” not the premise.