Chalabi takes center stage in Iraq
By Charles Recknagel
Inside and outside Iraq, there are many who hope the March 7 parliamentary
elections will be a major, unifying event for the country.
But those hopes have been clouded by the continuing crisis over the banning of
hundreds of mostly Sunni or secular candidates for alleged ties to the former
ruling Ba'athist Party.
The de-Ba'athification crisis has reignited Sunni charges that their community
is being pushed from the political stage by the Shi'ite-dominated government.
It has raised questions of whether the Sunnis might boycott this national
election as they did the previous parliamentary elections in 2005.
That uncertainty has been created, in large part, thanks to the
efforts of one man - Ahmad Chalabi, the chairman of the government's Justice
and Accountability Commission that banned the candidates.
Chalabi, who once championed the United States' toppling of Saddam Hussein in
2003, is today the man many accuse of doing the most to spoil US hopes for
politically stabilizing Iraq. He also is viewed as one of Iran's most effective
allies in Baghdad, working as actively with Tehran as he once did with
Washington.
Political survivor
A Shi'ite politician, Chalabi has briefly held portfolios as oil minister and
deputy prime minister since Saddam's overthrow. But it is as a proponent of
de-Ba'athification that he has built up his greatest power.
He served on the first US-established de-Ba'athification committee and then
stayed on to become chairman of the follow-on Justice and Accountability
Commission. That has given him and his close ally, commission director Ali
Allami, the means to not just blacklist other politicians but also condemn as
pro-Ba'athist any observer who protests.
Among those Chalabi accuses of being pro-Ba'athist is, ironically, Washington
itself. When US officials accuse the Justice and Accountability Commission of a
lack of transparency, Chalabi accuses them of wanting to return Ba'athists to
power.
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on February 18, US
ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill said that as he attempted to convince
Iraqis that the Chalabi-led de-Ba'athification process "lacks transparency, it
lacks buy-in from major parts of the electorate and therefore, you've got to be
very careful about how you're doing this," that "incredibly enough" his efforts
were "perceived as somehow the US somehow wants to see Ba'athists back."
Reidar Visser, editor of the Iraq website historiae.org and a research fellow
at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, says Chalabi's goal is to
ensure that the Shi'ite religious parties continue to dominate Iraqi politics.
"He seems to have identified Shi'ite sectarianism as the key to his own
political survival and it seems that his idea is to support the Shi'ite
Islamist parties' own strategy to remain politically influential in Iraq,"
Visser says.
Iran's comeback
Visser notes that Iraq's last nationwide elections, the local elections of
January 2009, were regarded as a wake-up call for the religious parties. In
those elections, allies of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki dealt the religious
parties a dramatic setback by running on platforms stressing national Iraqi
identity over sectarian affiliation.
Particularly worrying to the religious parties was Maliki's personal success in
cooperating with Sunni leaders to appeal across sectarian lines. That, along
with Maliki's earlier use of force against religious militias like the Imam
al-Mahdi Army to stabilize Iraq, fanned the religious parties' fears they could
be marginalized in a new nationalist-dominated order.
That fear was shared by Iran, Visser says, which has close ties to the Shi'ite
religious parties, and it was Chalabi who, in a meeting in Tehran in May 2009,
helped forge a "comeback strategy”.
Visser says that since the US-led invasion in 2003, it has "been a mainstay of
Iranian policy in Iraq to keep the Shi'ites unified," and that this strategy
was "in tatters" in early 2009 with the "fragmentation" of the Shi'ites. "It
seems clear now that Ahmad Chalabi played a key role in forging that
counterstrategy, which basically involved a move toward greater unification
once more among the Shi'ite parties."
The May meeting in Tehran brought together Muqtada al-Sadr, who was living in
the Iranian seminary city of Qom, and the leader of the Islamic Supreme Council
of Iraq, Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, who was being treated for cancer in the Iranian
capital. Chalabi was a leading negotiator in making peace between the two rival
factions and thus reconstituting much of the United Iraq Alliance that swept
the vote in 2005.
Visser says the religious parties' comeback strategy was to "get the Ba'athist
issue back on the agenda" as a way to sabotage nationalist coalitions. Tarring
secular rivals as Ba'athists had worked successfully in campaigning in 2005 and
this time the full weight of Chalabi's Justice and Accountability Commission
was brought into play as well.
Mutlaq out, and Maliki with him
One of the most prominent of Iraq's secular Sunni leaders, Salih al-Mutlaq, was
charged with ties to the banned Ba'athist Party even though he left it in
protest in 1997 and currently is a member of parliament. His barring from this
month's elections has dealt a blow to one of the biggest groupings of
candidates running on a nationalist platform, the al-Iraqiya alliance, which
also includes former prime minister Iyad Allawi.
The barring of Mutlaq put the secular Sunni camp in a tailspin from which it
has yet to clearly recover. Mutlaq's Iraqi Front for National Dialogue first
responded by threatening to boycott the election. But last week, Mutlaq, whose
protest against the ban was overruled by an appeals board, exhorted his
supporters to flock to the polls anyway.
"Stand up!" Mutlaq shouted to his supporters via a press conference on February
25. "Stand up and support your county!"
But if Chalabi's "de-Ba'athification" of Mutlaq has had a direct impact on the
race, more serious still may be how reviving the Ba'athist issue in general has
forced Maliki to back away from his own previously successful nationalist
posture.
After Chalabi's list of banned candidates came out, Maliki watched it gain a
striking amount of popular support, particularly among Shi'ite religious-party
supporters. Those voters also form part of his own electoral base. Apparently
sensing he could not risk defending the banned candidates, he gave the Justice
and Accountability Commission his full support.
The result, Visser says, was Maliki's loss of much of his own appeal as someone
able to rise above sectarianism and project an image of a national leader for
Sunnis and Shi'ite alike.
The Chalabi effect
The question surrounding the March 7 elections now is to what extent Chalabi's
groundwork will determine the new balance of power that comes out of the poll.
Washington hopes for a new, more sustainable balance of power between the
Shi'ite and Sunni communities that will permit the United States to withdraw
many of its troops. Chalabi's strategy is quite the opposite, to ensure that
the existing balance of power survives both this election and the US
withdrawal.
Chalabi was close to Washington as a key Iraqi voice in exile during the Saddam
years. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, the Iraqi National Congress, which
he co-founded, was a major source of the information for US intelligence about
Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and his alleged ties to al-Qaeda.
After the war, the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found strained
Chalabi's ties with Washington. So did accusations he passed information to
Iran.
The US commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, recently summed up Washington's
view of its former ally this way: "Chalabi ... has been involved in Iraqi
politics in many different ways over the last seven years, mostly bad."
Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
