He took millions of dollars from the CIA, founded and was accused of defrauding the second-biggest bank in Jordan and sold the Bush administration a bill of goods on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
At first championed by the Bush administration's neoconservatives as a potential leader of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi ended up persona non grata. Now, in an improbable twist of fate, Mr Chalabi is being talked about as a serious candidate for prime minister.
With Sunni insurgents rampaging across the country and sectarian killings on the rise, everything old seems new again in Iraq – including, apparently, Mr Chalabi. And on Monday, Obama administration officials said that about 200 more troops were sent to protect the US embassy in Baghdad and Baghdad airport.
In addition to those, another 100 troops, who the Pentagon had previously said would be sent to Iraq, are headed to Baghdad to help with security and logistics. The moves will raise the total number of US troops deployed to Iraq for security and advisory missions to about 750.
Death squads
As Iraq’s political parties held round-the-clock meetings over
the past three days to try to agree on the shape of a new government in time to convene parliament on Tuesday and begin choosing new leaders, Mr Chalabi’s name was one of two being prominently mentioned to replace incumbent prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Mr Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has only one seat in the parliament, his own, and it is a measure of his skill as a political operator that he is under consideration. It is also a measure of the desperate state of the effort to forge a new government amid severe sectarian strains and demands from both US and Iranian allies that Sunnis and Kurds be included – all while the country is under severe threat from Sunni-based Islamic extremists.
"Our candidates for prime minister are Adel Abdul Mahdi or Ahmad Chalabi," said Hakim al-Zamili, a prominent leader in the parliamentary bloc of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, part of the National Alliance, a coalition of Shia groups.
The alliance is trying to persuade the State of Law party of Mr al-Maliki, also a Shia, to stand aside for another Shia. “If State of Law refuses to accept any other candidate, we will ally with the Kurds and Sunnis to form a government,” said Mr al-Zamili, who was accused of organising death squads as Iraq’s deputy health minister.
“You know, there is a saying in Arabic that when you have seen death, you don’t mind a high fever,” said one aide to Mr al-Maliki who is among a growing number of his supporters hoping he will bow out. The aide’s point was that almost anything was possible in the contorted state of Iraqi politics.
On the face of it, Mr Chalabi (69) as prime minister seems, at best, highly unlikely. His exile-based, CIA-financed Iraqi National Congress never built much of a grass-roots following in Iraq, and he suffered from the Americans' growing unpopularity as the war dragged on. His role in promoting what many now view as concocted evidence of weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein badly tarnished him.
Only a year after the invasion, US forces raided his home in the upper-class Mansour district, apparently to try and prove he spied for Iran. Unlike many, Mr Chalabi stayed in Iraq through all the bad years, and not without risk; a suicide bomber narrowly missed him, killing six of his bodyguards.
Spurned by the Americans, he became an ally of Mr al-Sadr, the radical Shia leader, a friend to Iran and a regular visitor to the Shia ayatollahs in Najaf.
Lost support
Mr Chalabi put skills honed during long years of exile in Washington as a communicator and back-room operator to good use, forging alliances with the Sadrists and their Iranian patrons, and with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shias’ supreme religious leader. Some argue that Mr Chalabi is at best a long-shot candidate, but so is every al-Maliki opponent at this point. Mr al-Maliki’s State of Law party gained the most seats in the April 30th election, and now claims 95, well short of the 165 needed to make a majority in the 328-seat parliament.
But Mr al-Maliki has lost support from the powerful Shia clerics who, like the Americans, have politely but clearly signalled they would prefer he left.
Replacing Mr al-Maliki is one of the few things nearly all other politicians agree on: other Shia parties, as well as the Sunnis and Kurds and many tiny parties, which together could theoretically control as many as 233 seats in the parliament.
Enough seats
Mr al-Maliki’s State of Law supporters say the arithmetic is all on the incumbent’s side and scoff at suggestions any other candidate could replace him. “Even if other parties don’t attend the first session, the State of Law with other small parties joining it will have enough seats to form a government,” said a party leader,
Alia Nussif
.
Nevertheless, at least four State of Law political leaders have said they want to see Mr al-Maliki leave for someone who all Shias could coalesce around and other groups would find acceptable. That could either be some other figure in his party or, more likely, someone from one of the other major Shia parties, most likely the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
That is where Mr Chalabi's chance comes. In the recent elections, he ran as an independent with the Islamic Supreme Council alliance, whose leading candidate was Bayan Jabr.
Healing differences
Mr Jabr, however, was the interior minister during some of the worst days of sectarian violence, when police and security forces were deeply implicated in the killings of Sunnis.
Mr Chalabi, a secular Shia, would not have that problem, although he was in charge of the de-Baathification commission that stripped Sunni officials of their positions. Lately, he has called for de-Baathification to be ended in the interest of healing differences between sects.
Mr Chalabi also has the support of the followers of Mr al-Sadr whose allies control 34 seats in the new Parliament, even more than the Islamic Supreme Council, once the biggest Shia party, with 29.
Ahmed al-Sharifi, president of Iraqi think-tank, the Centre for Strategic Studies in southern Iraq, said Mr Chalabi was “a man everybody can agree on among Sunnis and Kurds”.
Even his old CIA connections are no longer a liability, he said. "Nobody cares about that stuff any more." – (New York Times)
