HE'S HERE AND TENET'S GONE:

Chalabi still in the fight: Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a brother-in-law of Shi'ite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, is the favorite to be Iraq's next premier. Also in the frame is Ahmad Chalabi, the wheeler-dealer darling of the US neo-conservatives until a highly public falling out, or so Chalabi would have people believe: don't rule him out just yet. (Sami Moubayed, 1/18/05, Asia Times)

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.

It would be comforting to think that our intelligence services are competent enough to pull something like this off, but it's more likely that the CIA tried destroying him because he was too close to the neocons for their tastes and it blew up in their faces.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 17, 2005 8:11 AM