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Chalabi still in the
fight
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - The outcome of the Iraqi
elections was overshadowed this week by the brutal
assassination of Lebanon's ex-prime minister Rafiq
Harriri on February 15. As one country faced the
danger of falling into chaos after the death of
its leader, another was rising out of the ashes
with election results that were not only
democratic, after years of Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship, but surprising to all those awaiting
them.
Surprising results
The
parties based on tribes, expected to do well at
the polls due to Iraq's tribal composition,
surprisingly received only 3,850 votes, getting no
seats in the 275-seat Iraqi National Assembly.
Ethnic parties (Kurd and Turkmen) received 27% of
the seats, while individual lists (getting a
measly 52,399 votes) received no seats in the
assembly. The Iraqi communists did a little
better, receiving 73,354 votes, while the
monarchist party of Sharif Ali, descendant to the
Iraqi throne, received only 118,098 votes and it,
too, received no seats in the assembly. In fact,
of the parties competing for office, only 11
received seats. Only 19 of the 111 lists received
more than 10,000 votes, while all small parties
received only 500-1,000 votes.
Nasser
al-Chadarchi, leader of the National Democratic
Party and an ex-member of the post-Saddam Iraqi
Governing Council, received only 1,603 votes.
Secular democratic parties, expected to do poorly,
received an impressive 19%, yet the leader of the
secular democrats, the veteran diplomat Adnan
Pachachi, who leads a cross-ethnic and
multi-confessional list, also failed to win a seat
for himself in the assembly. The strong Prime
Minister Iyad Allawi, expected to perform with
flying colors at the polls, received only 14%. The
Kurds won 25% of the seats in the new assembly,
making them the number two power-brokers in Iraq,
after the Shi'ites grouped in the United Iraqi
Alliance.
The largest coalition of Shi'ite
leaders, headed by cleric Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim and
backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, very
surprisingly did not receive its expected 60%
majority. It polled with a high 48%, however,
earning a majority (4,075,295 votes) yet reducing
fears that the Shi'ites would impose an
Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq. Hakim said that
he was not interested in the post of prime
minister, which has to go to a Shi'ite, and agreed
to withdraw his candidate, the French-trained
Minister of Finance Adel Abdul-Mehdi, from the
premiership race in favor of the current vice
president, Dr Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who commands
wide respect and popularity in Iraq.
In
return, Hakim received a promise that the upcoming
two vice presidents would be from his men, and two
central portfolios in the new cabinet would also
be handed to his allies. The twist that emerged
this week is that with Mehdi out of the race,
Jaafari stands for the premiership against the
controversial yet seasoned Machiavellian
politician, Ahmad Chalabi, a man who was thought
to be politically finished six months ago. He has
miraculously bounced back to life, and is poised
to change Iraq's future once again, as he did in
2003.
Chalabi vs Jaafari
Chalabi was born in 1944 into
a powerful and wealthy family in the Shi'ite
community of Baghdad. He left Iraq at 14 when the
army seized power in 1958, toppling the monarchy
of the boy-king, 
Faysal II. He studied mathematics at the
University of Chicago, taught at the American
University of Beirut and in 1977 went to Jordan to
establish the Petra Bank. When the bank collapsed
in 1990, a Jordanian military tribunal convicted
him of bank fraud and financial misdealing,
sentencing him to 22 years of hard labor. He fled
to the US, and in 1992 created the Iraqi National
Congress (INC) aimed at toppling the regime of
Saddam with US funds.
He had no vision on
what or whom should rule Iraq after the the Ba'ath
Party. The INC received US$335,000 per month from
the Pentagon, and another $33 million from the
State Department, according to a report issued by
the US General Accounting Office in 2004. In
return, Chalabi provided the Central Intelligence
Agency with loads of information, most of which
proved very inaccurate, or in some cases totally
wrong, implicating Saddam in links to al-Qaeda and
in plans to develop his weapons of mass
destruction program.
This was used by then
US secretary of state Colin Powell as "evidence"
of Saddam's danger to world security at a United
Nations presentation in February 2003. Chalabi
established business relationships with leading
neo-conservatives in the Pentagon, befriending men
like Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz and Richard
Pearle of the Defense Policy Board, with whom he
had worked since 1985. He was marketed by US
journalist Jim Hogland of The Washington Post as
the democracy-man of Iraq, and hailed by Judith
Miller of The New York Times for providing
information on Saddam's weapons program.
Chalabi lobbied in Washington for passing
the Iraqi Liberation Act in February 1998, which
secured $97 million in financial assistance to the
Iraqi opposition. Nearly all of the money was
channeled through Chalabi himself, and his critics
accused him of pocketing a huge portion of it. His
selective financial distribution enabled him to
gain a wide network of supporters both in Iraq and
in exile, whom he enticed with US money.
Chalabi returned in triumph to Iraq after
the fall of Saddam in March 2003. He became
president of the Iraqi Provisional Authority in
September 2003, and has since been regarded as one
of the most influential leaders who worked with
the US in the 1990s to bring down the Ba'ath
Party. Pretty soon, he began to quarrel with the
Americans, over how they were running Iraq,
claiming (at first in private discourse) that they
should let the Iraqis chose their interim
government and that neither chief administrator L
Paul Bremer nor the UN should have a say in this
"domestic" affair.
Chalabi was angered by
the fact that while he was once regarded by
Washington as the top man to rule in the
post-Saddam era, the US was now relying on a
variety of different people to run post-Saddam
Iraq. It was Iyad Allawi and not Chalabi who was
handpicked to become the first post-Saddam
premier, something that enraged him. The once
obedient US ally became very bitter at being
sidelined and replaced by other politicians,
speaking to the New York Times: "We are grateful
to President [George W] Bush for liberating Iraq,
but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their
affairs."
The honeymoon with the Americans
came to an abrupt end, but Chalabi failed to shrug
off his US connection and depict himself as an
honest and independent politician to the Iraqi
people. To many inside Iraq, he remained an
untrustworthy US stooge. In fact, a survey was
conducted in February 2004 by Oxford Research
International, in which 3,000 Iraqis were polled,
and only 0.2% said that he was a trustworthy
leader. The Americans then began a systematic
smear campaign aimed at discrediting Chalabi,
shedding light on their past connections with him
and on his financial problems with Petra Bank in
Jordan. They brought him to court for fraud in
exchange of Iraqi money, done in the immediate
aftermath of Saddam's fall, along with accusations
of grand theft since 2003.
In February
2004, speaking to the London-based Daily
Telegraph, Chalabi snapped back: "What was said
before is not important. The Bush administration
is looking for a scapegoat [for their failure to
run Iraq]." The US responded on May 19, 2004 by
cutting off all of the financial assistance it was
giving to Chalabi, and on May 20 Iraqi police and
US troops stormed his office and home in Baghdad A
warrant was issued for his arrest on August 8.
Undaunted, Chalabi returned to Iraq on August 10,
and to everybody's surprise he was not arrested.
He suffered an assassination attempt on September
1, while returning from a meeting with Sistani,
but survived.
Most likely, Chalabi had
reached some sort of secret agreement with the US
that prevented his arrest and brought him back
into Washington's orbit. Shortly afterwards,
charges brought against him were dropped for lack
of evidence. Why did Chalabi quarrel with the US
in the first place? Was it because he wanted to
polish his ruined image among normal Iraqis, and
shake off the US hallmark? Or was it because,
truly, he was an Iraqi nationalist at heart who
had unwillingly worked with the US to topple
Saddam, and now that the dictator was gone, saw no
need for a further alliance with Washington.
Many in Iraq doubt if there was ever a
quarrel to begin with, claiming that Chalabi's row
with Washington was fabricated by both parties to
polish his image in Iraq, prepare him for victory
in the January 30 elections and enable him to
become prime minister in February-March. This, in
fact, would mean that Chalabi and the US carried
out their Iraqi plans, hatched in 1998-2002, with
high precision in a very twisted and creative
manner: the toppling of Saddam using fabricated
information provided by Chalabi, and his
replacement by a very cooperative Chalabi in an
Iraq occupied and run by the US.
Ibrahim al-Jaafari's
claim
Jaafari's profile comes across as
more convincing and clear-cut than that of
Chalabi. He was born in 1947 in Karbala and was
educated as a medical doctor at Mosul University,
joining the Dawa Party, the oldest Shi'ite party
in Iraq, in 1968. He actively worked among its
ranks until Saddam began to murder its 
members in 1979, after the
Iranian Revolution, accusing them of being agents
of Iran.
Jaafari fled to Iran in 1980,
becoming involved in the anti-Saddam movement, and
in 1989 moved to London, where he headed his
party's office until Saddam's fall in 2003. Like
Chalabi, he hurried to Iraq and took office in the
US-backed Iraqi Governing Council, serving as its
first chairman. On June 1, 2004 he became one of
the two deputies to the interim president, Ghazi
al-Yawer. Jaafari worked closely with his
brother-in-law, Sistani, and joined the United
Iraqi Alliance that was backed by Sistani for the
January elections, emerging with a sound majority
vote, seconded only by Hakim.
Unlike
Chalabi, who until his return to Iraq in 2003 was
almost unheard of in local political circles,
Jaafari leads the Dawa Party, which is well
entrenched in Iraqi society due to its long
history and the oppression it suffered during the
Saddam era. Yet while Chalabi has publicly called
on the Americans to leave Iraq, although he was
the man accredited with bringing them in in the
first place, Jaafari has made it clear that if
elected prime minister he has no intention of
asking the US to withdraw its army - especially at
this stage.
"It might not be the proper
decision," he said. He has kept a low profile on
all matters affecting the US's image and
credibility in Iraq, remaining speechless during
the US war on Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in
August 2004, and the assault on Fallujah in
November 2004. Although operating from a religious
party and related by marriage to Sistani, he
appears to be a moderate, saying that the upcoming
constitution should specify Islam as one of the
many legislations, and not the only source of
legislation in Iraq. He also supports women's
rights, probably under Sistani's urging, and says
that Iraqi women could, if they wanted, assume the
post of president or prime minister. This echoed a
statement made by Sistani before the elections,
calling on Iraqi women to vote, even if their
husbands forbade them from doing so.
Once
this competition between Chalabi and Jaafari is
settled, the new Iraqi leaders will still have
much on their hands. The National Assembly will
have to elect the new president and his vice
presidents, and in turn, they will elect the new
prime minister, who will be the de facto ruler of
Iraq, chosen from a parliamentary majority. He
will then have to win assembly approval for his
cabinet. Once that is done, the assembly will work
for 11 months on a permanent constitution for
Iraq, which will be voted on by the Iraqi people
in October. If the constitution draft is approved,
the Iraqi people will elect a new cabinet, or
maintain the prime minister in a cabinet
reshuffle, in December. If the constitution is not
approved, then the Iraqis will have to go through
the entire process once again, from A-Z.
The dispute on who will become prime
minister will be settled in the upcoming week
through political bargaining between Jaafari and
Chalabi. While most observers inside Iraq predict
that Jaafari will win, due to his unblemished
political history, Chalabi might surprise everyone
with victory, just as he did by ending disputes
with the US, after a honeymoon that lasted for
years, and emerging victorious in the elections.
If he loses, Chalabi might as well turn into a
nuisance, creating an opposition bloc to whomever
the new leader of Iraq would be, backed by other
dissidents sidelined by the current elections,
such as Allawi, Sharif Ali, or Sunni groups
alienated by the Shi'ite-dominated regime. He
could also persuade other secular Shi'ites like
himself to withdraw from the alliance and not much
lobbying would be needed to break the 140-man
alliance, which if deprived of only two members,
would no longer have a majority in the National
Assembly. "Its down to myself and Jaafari," he
said.
Editor's note
On
Wednesday, top Shi'ite politicians failed to reach
a consensus on their nominee for prime minister.
Ali Hashim al-Youshaa, one of the United Iraqi
Alliance's leaders, said after hours of
closed-door meetings that members of the
clergy-backed alliance had agreed to hold a secret
ballot to choose between Jaafari and Chalabi, most
likely on Friday.
Dr Sami
Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
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