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Chalabi: with friends like the US
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By David Isenberg
 Prior
to the United States-led invasion of Iraq, many war
supporters had a number of assumptions: Iraqi soldiers
wouldn't fight at all, American forces would be greeted
as liberators, and longtime Iraqi dissidents in exile,
such as Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National
Congress (INC), which has long been funded by the US,
would be enthusiastically received. Give the war
supporters their due; at least they have been
consistent, consistently wrong. They are batting zero
for three so far.
Chalabi, 58, has long been the
poster boy of Iraqi exiles and its most public face. It
is fair to say that he is better known outside Iraq than
inside it. He certainly does not have much experience in
current-day Iraq. Although his father and grandfather
once held high-ranking ministerial posts in the Iraqi
government, they were forced to flee in 1958, when
Chalabi was 13, in the aftermath of a coup d'etat that
unseated Iraq's royal family. He had not been back,
except to the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq
- until this month.
Through the INC, which he
founded more than a decade ago, he has tirelessly
lobbied the US government for regime change in Iraq,
even when the issue was a nonstarter. His friends
include those in high places, such as Vice President
Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, and they and Congress
have seen him for years as the leading candidate to lead
a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, a view not held by the State
Department nor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Chalabi, however, is hardly baggage-free. In
1992, the Jordanian government convicted him in absentia
for embezzlement and fraud and sentenced him to 22 years
of hard labor. The charges stem from the demise of the
Petra Bank, which Chalabi founded in 1977 and ran until
it collapsed in 1989. At its peak, the bank was Jordan's
third largest.
The charges surrounding Chalabi's
conviction are murky. Chalabi has long insisted that he
was railroaded, that he was the victim of Saddam leaning
on Jordan to rein him in for his opposition activities.
But by Jordan's accounting, Chalabi diverted millions of
dollars of depositors' assets before his bank collapsed.
Last week, the Guardian in London reported that
it had reviewed documents on the Petra Bank collapse
prepared by Arthur Andersen that revealed that the
bank's assets had been overstated by $200 million as a
result of bad debts, unsupported foreign currency
balances and money owed the bank that was unaccounted
for.
Chalabi was airlifted by the US military
into Iraq into the town of Nasiriyah with a band of
armed followers on April 6. He made his first public
appearance in Baghdad on April 18, and has been busy
competing for power ever since. He set up his Baghdad
headquarters in what was Uday Saddam's private club,
known as the Mansour Hunting Club, in the shadow of the
unfinished Saddam Mosque.
So far, Chalabi has
made strenuous efforts to insert himself into the thick
of the post-war occupation, with mixed results. He has
been meeting with tribal leaders, bankers, lawyers and
Kurdish leaders, among others. He also claims that
Saddam is still in Iraq and is moving around the
country. "We are aware of his movements, and we are
aware of the areas that he has been to, and we learn of
this within 12 to 24 hours," Chalabi told British
Broadcasting Corp (BBC) radio earlier this week.
Chalabi's party, known locally as the Democratic
Conference, will be represented at conference of Iraqi
political leaders in Baghdad at the weekend. The meet is
aimed at the establishment of an Iraqi interim authority
that will work with Jay Garner, the retired
lieutenant-general appointed by the Bush administration
to oversee postwar Iraq.
Not all have been
impressed with Chalabi's efforts to date. Last weekend,
Senator Richard Lugar (Republican - Indiana) and
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
said, "I would say that his entry with the 700 people
sponsored by the Pentagon was certainly an interesting
phenomenon. But he's one of many, many players - maybe
hundreds - in the country now who will have to defend
for himself, have to make a case along with his
followers. The thought that somehow he could be anointed
is preposterous."
Chalabi's role to date has
created as much confusion as clarity. As David Ignatius
noted in Wednesday's Washington Post, "Postwar
reconstruction is always messy. But in this case a bad
situation is being made worse by the Bush
administration's failure to resolve a longstanding feud
over what role Chalabi and his group should play.
Civilian officials at the Pentagon clearly want him to
have the lead role. State Department and CIA officials
don't trust him and want a broader strategy that
combines external and internal figures. Chalabi, for his
part, mistrusts the CIA and thinks it has badly botched
operations in Iraq."
Writing the same day in
the New York Times, Dilip Hiro, a veteran journalist and
commentator on the region wrote, "But contrary to his
Pentagon backers, the CIA's longtime assessment of him
remains solid: although he is a Shi'ite, he lacks any
constituency inside Iraq. Nor is he likely to inspire
new followers. Had he joined the hundreds of thousands
of Shi'ites who made the pilgrimage to Karbala this
week, he might have enhanced his standing. But
apparently he couldn't be bothered."
Chalabi
calls himself a "secular Shi'ite". But his father was a
Sunni, and he is not known for any particular religious
devotion in the 45 years that he has spent living
outside Iraq. Such subdued religiosity goes down well in
the US, but won't win him any popularity with the masses
of Shi'ites beginning to emerge on the streets of Iraq
after decades of repression under the Sunni-dominated
Ba'ath Party.
Nor is Chalabi likely to be able
to accomplish anything by force of arms. His followers,
mostly exiles like himself, armed and trained by the US,
number less than 700. Compare that to the 10,000-man
army of the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, headed by the Tehran-based Ayatollah Bakr
al-Hakim, which has been vocal in saying that the
Americans should leave the country quickly.
That
means that if Chalabi wants to make his way in Iraq he
will have to rely on US military forces. But that is
certain to cement his reputation among Iraqis as a tool
of the Americans; not something that will do him much
good, unless he prefers being known as the Karzai of
Iraq, a la Hamad Karzai in Afghanistan.
(©2003
Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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