Chalabi: From White House to dog
house By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - It was just last
January that Ahmed Chalabi occupied the coveted balcony
seat next to First Lady Laura Bush and gazed out at
Washington's glittering elite who had gathered to
hear President George W Bush deliver his
State of the Union address from the Capitol's imposing
rostrum.
The darling of the neo-conservative
hawks around Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld, Chalabi had long been touted by
his champions as the future leader of a democratic Iraq,
if not its "George Washington". Indeed, he could
legitimately claim credit for having been the Iraqi who
was most responsible for persuading the Bush
administration to oust Saddam Hussein.
So how is
it that exactly five months later Chalabi was rudely
interrupted when US agents and soldiers burst into his
bedroom in Baghdad on Thursday morning as part of a
series of coordinated raids at his residence and
offices?
According to Chalabi's account,
combined Iraqi police and US forces carted away files,
computers and some of his aides during the operation. In
an angry press conference conducted a short time later,
Chalabi accused the US-led Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) of striking out against him for
political reasons, particularly for his outspoken
opposition to efforts by United Nations special envoy
Lakhdar Brahimi to appoint a new government that will
assume formal sovereignty on July 1.
"I'm
calling for policies that would liberate the Iraqi
people and give them full sovereignty now," said
Chalabi, who was careful to reiterate his gratitude to
Bush for freeing Iraq from Saddam. "I'm doing this in a
way they don't like," he said, adding that he was
severing his relationship with the CPA.
But at
the State Department, spokesman Richard Boucher denied
that politics was involved. "Clearly there were legal
and investigative reasons for this event today and not
political ones," he said, stressing that the warrants
for the raids were issued by an Iraqi judge and carried
out by Iraqi police.
Whatever the reason - and
many could be relevant - there is little doubt that
Chalabi's apparent fall from grace confirms that the
two-year battle for control of US policy in Iraq has
reached a tipping point in favor of the realist faction
in the State Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), which has long considered Chalabi a
self-dealing opportunist, a confidence trickster and a
crook.
Their views now appear to be fully shared
by Robert Blackwill, the National Security Council
official who heads the Iraqi Stabilization Group that
was created last October when it first became clear the
US-led occupation was in deep trouble. Since then,
Blackwill, who has been working closely with Brahimi for
several months, has been trying with increasing success
to reduce the Pentagon's influence in Iraq.
Conversely, the raids also signal the loss of
credibility within the administration, at least so far
as Iraq is concerned, of the neo-conservatives -
including Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz,
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith,
Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis Libby and former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle - who
championed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC)
for much of the past decade.
Thursday's raids
came in the wake of the announcement earlier this week
that the Pentagon was cutting off US$335,000 in monthly
payments to the INC, which it had provided for the past
several years as part of a classified program to help
gather intelligence in Iraq. The decisions was
criticized by Perle, who insisted on Monday that the INC
and "Chalabi in particular are the best hope for Iraq".
The raids also came as reports of wrongdoing by
the former exile - including nepotism, bribery,
corruption and even blackmail - have been steadily
piling up in recent months.
Despite his
extremely low standing in recent public-opinion surveys,
Chalabi's position on the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC),
his influence over key government ministries and his
control of intelligence files of Saddam's Mukhabarat
seized during the invasion have made him a formidable
power who may no longer rely entirely on his standing in
Washington.
While the administration could
ignore much of this, more damaging charges recently have
surfaced through a number of leaks that have made the
continuing existence of a warm relationship with him
increasingly untenable.
That INC-affiliated
defectors, for example, provided much of the faulty
pre-war intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass
destruction programs - which became the principal
justification for the US invasion - has not done well in
Congress, among either Democrats or Republicans.
And the fact that Chalabi has boasted about it -
"We are heroes in error" and "As far as we're concerned,
we've been entirely successful" - has not helped his
cause.
In addition, Congress' watchdog, the
General Accounting Office, is currently investigating
reports that some of the $18 million provided by
Washington to the INC between 1998 - when Congress
passed the Iraq Liberation Act - and last year's
invasion was used by the group and its US consultants to
lobby the government for an invasion and to plant
articles in the media. Both actions would violate US
law.
While these acts - as well as the fact that
Jordan has considered him a fugitive from justice since
his conviction in absentia in 1992 for bank fraud that
led to the collapse of the country's second-largest bank
- may be forgivable, recent moves by Chalabi have put
greater strains on his relationship with the Bush
administration.
Electronic intercepts by US
intelligence agencies suggested he was cultivating
Iran's leadership a little too fervently, even to the
extent of providing "sensitive" information on the US
security operations next door in Iraq of the kind that,
according to one source cited by Newsweek, could "get
people killed". That information, which was leaked late
last month, gave even some of Chalabi's neo-con
supporters pause.
At the same time, Chalabi, who
as an IGC member organized a sweeping purge of
Ba'athists from the government, was infuriated by CPA
chief L Paul Bremer's decision to reverse the IGC by
hiring back thousands of former Ba'ath Party members to
positions in the security forces.
After the
Marines permitted former senior Iraqi military offers to
take control of Fallujah, Chalabi, a secular Shi'ite,
began publicly campaigning against a
"re-Ba'athification" of the country, which he compared
to the hiring of Nazis in post-war Germany.
In
recent weeks, he has tried to stoke fears among the
majority Shi'ite and Kurdish communities that the US was
delivering Iraq back to the Ba'athists and minority
Sunnis by attacking Brahimi as a Sunni Muslim and an
"Arab nationalist", presumably determined to bring about
a Sunni or Ba'athist restoration.
He also
rejected UN and US demands to turn over intelligence
files seized by the INC during the invasion, which
allegedly documented massive corruption by UN and other
officials in the world body's oil-for-food program, to a
UN-sponsored probe that Chalabi claims will be a
whitewash.
All of these activities represent
serious threats to US plans - as vague as they continue
to be - to transfer sovereignty to a new government on
July 1, which, given the ongoing chaos in Iraq, is as
far ahead as policymakers can think at the moment. "He's
trying to destabilize the process," said one official,
adding: "He's not on our team any more."
Chalabi
appears to agree: "When America treats its friends this
way, then they are in big trouble."
hear President George W Bush deliver his
State of the Union address from the Capitol's imposing
rostrum. 
