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Controversial exile leader Chalabi back in Iraq
By Los Angeles Times and Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — This is the make-or-break moment for Ahmed Chalabi, the U.S.-educated banker and convicted felon who has both impressed and alienated a string of U.S. administrations. Pentagon allies hope Chalabi, who was airlifted Sunday into southern Iraq, can demonstrate his popularity and emerge as a leading figure — and possibly the head — of a transitional authority replacing Saddam Hussein. Critics at the State Department and CIA predict that Chalabi and his band of hastily recruited troops will fail to attract widespread support.
No one who has dealt with him is neutral on Chalabi.
Although he fled Iraq in the 1950s as a youth, his backers view him as the country's hope in the 21st century. "He's a man of courage and devotion and honor. I've known him for 12 years, and the better I get to know him, the more I respect him," said renowned Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis of Princeton University.
Supporters say he shares with the Bush administration a common vision for a democratic, secular Iraq that encourages free enterprise, eschews extremism and is pro-Western.
His detractors portray him as a catalyst for political calamity in postwar Baghdad. "I can't think of a single Arab country that would really welcome him even as a visitor," said the foreign minister of one Arab country, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Government officials from four of the six countries bordering Iraq have cautioned the United States against giving Chalabi too much power. American critics cite as warning signs his conviction in Jordan for bank fraud in the 1980s and his close ties to Iran, which he recently has played off against the United States. They also say his political ambitions and sometimes haughty, imperial ways are flash points for squabbling among the already fractured Iraqi opposition.
Eschewing ambitions
Chalabi, leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), has repeatedly claimed that he has no ambitions beyond liberating Iraq, after which he intends to get out of politics. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that Chalabi's presence in southern Iraq was no indication of any special political support for him.
"Clearly, the United States is not going to impose a government on Iraq," Rumsfeld told reporters. "The Iraqi people are going to sort out what their Iraqi government ought to look like."
Chalabi's detractors in the Bush administration aren't buying the denials.
"Then how come not one of the many other exiles who want a role in post-Saddam Iraq were also brought in?" asked one administration official. Some State Department officials in Kuwait were privately furious that Chalabi had been airlifted into southern Iraq, charging it amounted to an unwarranted push to secure him a top role in the postwar government.
Chalabi's unpopularity with the CIA dates to the mid-1990s, when he spent several years in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq. In 1995, INC members and Kurdish forces tried to mount an uprising against Saddam's forces but failed, Chalabi says, because the Clinton administration let him down. The agency preferred another group called the Iraqi National Accord, made up of defectors from Saddam's army based in Jordan.
When Chalabi warned the CIA that a plot by the army defectors had been penetrated by Saddam's intelligence agents, he was ignored, he says. The defectors' plot failed, and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), which was then feuding with its rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, invited Saddam to send troops into the rival's stronghold. In the process, Saddam crushed the CIA's Kurdish base, arresting and killing more than 100 Iraqi CIA agents. The CIA did not return to northern Iraq until ordered to by President Bush last year.
State Department officials say Chalabi has yet to account for half of $4 million in funds for an intelligence-collection project in Iraq that the State Department suspended and the more Chalabi-friendly Pentagon took responsibility for in 2002.
But few Iraqis have worked harder to convince successive U.S. governments that Saddam had to go — and that Washington had to help make that happen.
Chalabi, a member of Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim sect, is certainly an unusual blend of the traditional Arab world and the modern West.
A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics, he once taught at the American University in Beirut and later headed the Petra Bank in Jordan. In the 1980s, a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement and sentenced him to 22 years in prison. He still is subject to arrest in Jordan, according to senior Jordanian officials.
Chalabi has ties with senior Republicans on Capitol Hill that go back more than a decade. A GOP aide estimated that the Iraqi has met with key Republican senators at least a half-dozen times since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the INC emerged as a coalition of disparate factions melded into one group — in part to win U.S. support.
Chalabi, a British citizen and London resident, works Washington better than many politicians, both allies and critics say. Vice President Dick Cheney is one of his supporters. He's worked closely with former CIA Director James Woolsey and Gen. Wayne Downing, who served on the Bush administration National Security Council, to develop political and military plans to topple Saddam.
Princeton professor Lewis, who met Chalabi at a conference of the Council on Foreign Relations after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, helped him develop the contacts he has with Republicans today. Lewis made calls on Chalabi's behalf to officials in the first Bush administration, including Zalmay Khalilzad, then a mid-level Pentagon appointee and now the White House envoy to the Iraqi opposition. Other early Chalabi backers include Richard Perle, former chairman of a Pentagon advisory board, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense.
Shiites' concerns
But Chalabi might have stronger backing in the United States than in Iraq.
Among his rivals for the support of Iraq's Arab Shiites are such senior Iraqi clerics as Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, who lives in Iran and heads another exile faction, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
A recent CIA report on Iraqi sentiments about a post-Saddam government concluded that "overwhelming numbers" of Iraqis were suspicious and skeptical of Chalabi and the INC, according to a U.S. official familiar with the assessment. But the report came to the same conclusion about al-Hakim's group.
Shiite clerics still in Iraq are demanding that a new government include significant representation for Shiites, who comprise about two-thirds of Iraq's 24 million people. Sheikh Yussef al-Khirallah, a cleric in the southern Iraqi town of Rifa'i, said Shiites would demand parliamentary elections under United Nations supervision.
Thanks to Saddam's elimination of virtually all internal political rivals in the two decades since he became Iraq's absolute ruler, the country has no figure such as South Africa's Nelson Mandela or Czech intellectual Vaclav Havel waiting to assume political power.
Instead, there is an alphabet soup of exiled opposition groups led by Iraqis who had no chance of supplanting Saddam until the Bush administration decided to do the job for them.
The scenes of looting and chaos in the streets of Basra and Baghdad that have followed the entrance of British and American troops, however, could be a harbinger of the lawlessness that could make Iraqis prefer another strongman — albeit someone less brutal than Saddam — to Chalabi, who has so far shown more aptitude for lobbying on Capitol Hill than for leadership.
The first test could come next week, when the Bush administration hopes to organize a conference of Iraqis in the southern Iraq city of Nasiriyah to discuss formation of an interim government.
"We will move as quickly as possible to place governmental responsibilities under the control of an interim authority composed of Iraqis from both inside and outside the country," Bush told a news conference yesterday in Northern Ireland, where he met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
A State Department official said the administration is "still working on the guest list."
The administration's affinity with Chalabi also stems from a shared analysis of Middle East politics: that regime change in Iraq is not only possible, but has the potential to break the authoritarian mold of the Arab world and usher in democratic governments that will live in peace with each other, the West and Israel.
That vision arouses reactions ranging from skepticism to ridicule among many other Middle East analysts, who suggest that Chalabi curries favor by telling his patrons what they want to hear.
Iraq is not ripe for democracy, these analysts say, and neither is the rest of the region. The best one can hope for is gradual political reform built on better education and advancement of women's rights. Any effort to impose a democracy through U.S. invasion and occupation is not only bound to fail but could boomerang and bring more instability and bloodshed, they say.
But Kanan Makiya, a Harvard University scholar and Iraqi human-rights advocate, says it is the very brutality of Saddam's rule that makes democracy the only option now for a country of diverse ethnic groups. "It is the fact that we have experienced the worst that makes us think we can move in a dramatically different direction," he said.
Senior officials in neighboring Sunni Arab countries fear a more democratic Iraq would bring to power a Shiite theocracy like that in Iran.
"Inevitably, given Iraq's past, any attempt to build democracy there will be long, slow and difficult," says Thomas Carothers, who directs the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trying to implant a government led by Chalabi would be something "we would come to regret."
Skeptical allies
Even Iraqi allies are highly critical of Chalabi's political maneuverings. Kurds who have variously been in and out of the INC umbrella are skeptical of Chalabi, and some don't trust him at all. Many view him as a carpetbagger who fled Iraq and showed up again on the eve of change, while others stayed and suffered through Saddam's regime.
Many Kurdish officials chafe at what they describe as Chalabi's towering ego and princely air, but they don't underestimate him. Many admire his intellect and his political shrewdness.
"He's tenacious and articulate," said a senior Kurdish official. "He's already promising ministry posts. He's cultivating the Turks. He's playing games in Washington. He's smart, you have to give him this. But the opposition is not liberating Iraq. The U.S. is liberating Iraq."
Other long-standing INC allies say Chalabi is a good tactician and power broker but accuse him of being a self-absorbed showman who has trouble maintaining relationships vital to long-term political stability.
"At some point people are going to understand that he is like the emperor without any clothes," said a top INC official who has worked closely with Chalabi for years.
Arab diplomats argue that most Iraqis will never accept Chalabi, particularly if he is seen as a puppet of the Republican right. "They are proud people and rather aggressive," one Arab envoy said. Once the Americans leave, "they will tear him apart."
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