Global Policy Forum

By David Isenberg

Prior to the United States-led invasion of Iraq, many war supporters had a number of assumptions: Iraqi soldiers wouldn't fight at all, American forces would be greeted as liberators, and longtime Iraqi dissidents in exile, such as Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which has long been funded by the US, would be enthusiastically received. Give the war supporters their due; at least they have been consistent, consistently wrong. They are batting zero for three so far. Chalabi, 58, has long been the poster boy of Iraqi exiles and its most public face. It is fair to say that he is better known outside Iraq than inside it. He certainly does not have much experience in current-day Iraq. Although his father and grandfather once held high-ranking ministerial posts in the Iraqi government, they were forced to flee in 1958, when Chalabi was 13, in the aftermath of a coup d'etat that unseated Iraq's royal family. He had not been back, except to the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq - until this month.

Through the INC, which he founded more than a decade ago, he has tirelessly lobbied the US government for regime change in Iraq, even when the issue was a nonstarter. His friends include those in high places, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, and they and Congress have seen him for years as the leading candidate to lead a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, a view not held by the State Department nor the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Chalabi, however, is hardly baggage-free. In 1992, the Jordanian government convicted him in absentia for embezzlement and fraud and sentenced him to 22 years of hard labor. The charges stem from the demise of the Petra Bank, which Chalabi founded in 1977 and ran until it collapsed in 1989. At its peak, the bank was Jordan's third largest.

The charges surrounding Chalabi's conviction are murky. Chalabi has long insisted that he was railroaded, that he was the victim of Saddam leaning on Jordan to rein him in for his opposition activities. But by Jordan's accounting, Chalabi diverted millions of dollars of depositors' assets before his bank collapsed. Last week, the Guardian in London reported that it had reviewed documents on the Petra Bank collapse prepared by Arthur Andersen that revealed that the bank's assets had been overstated by $200 million as a result of bad debts, unsupported foreign currency balances and money owed the bank that was unaccounted for.

Chalabi was airlifted by the US military into Iraq into the town of Nasiriyah with a band of armed followers on April 6. He made his first public appearance in Baghdad on April 18, and has been busy competing for power ever since. He set up his Baghdad headquarters in what was Uday Saddam's private club, known as the Mansour Hunting Club, in the shadow of the unfinished Saddam Mosque. So far, Chalabi has made strenuous efforts to insert himself into the thick of the post-war occupation, with mixed results. He has been meeting with tribal leaders, bankers, lawyers and Kurdish leaders, among others. He also claims that Saddam is still in Iraq and is moving around the country. "We are aware of his movements, and we are aware of the areas that he has been to, and we learn of this within 12 to 24 hours," Chalabi told British Broadcasting Corp (BBC) radio earlier this week. Chalabi's party, known locally as the Democratic Conference, will be represented at conference of Iraqi political leaders in Baghdad at the weekend. The meet is aimed at the establishment of an Iraqi interim authority that will work with Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant-general appointed by the Bush administration to oversee postwar Iraq.

Not all have been impressed with Chalabi's efforts to date. Last weekend, Senator Richard Lugar (Republican - Indiana) and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, "I would say that his entry with the 700 people sponsored by the Pentagon was certainly an interesting phenomenon. But he's one of many, many players - maybe hundreds - in the country now who will have to defend for himself, have to make a case along with his followers. The thought that somehow he could be anointed is preposterous." Chalabi's role to date has created as much confusion as clarity. As David Ignatius noted in Wednesday's Washington Post, "Postwar reconstruction is always messy. But in this case a bad situation is being made worse by the Bush administration's failure to resolve a longstanding feud over what role Chalabi and his group should play. Civilian officials at the Pentagon clearly want him to have the lead role. State Department and CIA officials don't trust him and want a broader strategy that combines external and internal figures. Chalabi, for his part, mistrusts the CIA and thinks it has badly botched operations in Iraq."

Writing the same day in the New York Times, Dilip Hiro, a veteran journalist and commentator on the region wrote, "But contrary to his Pentagon backers, the CIA's longtime assessment of him remains solid: although he is a Shi'ite, he lacks any constituency inside Iraq. Nor is he likely to inspire new followers. Had he joined the hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites who made the pilgrimage to Karbala this week, he might have enhanced his standing. But apparently he couldn't be bothered." Chalabi calls himself a "secular Shi'ite". But his father was a Sunni, and he is not known for any particular religious devotion in the 45 years that he has spent living outside Iraq. Such subdued religiosity goes down well in the US, but won't win him any popularity with the masses of Shi'ites beginning to emerge on the streets of Iraq after decades of repression under the Sunni-dominated Ba'ath Party.

Nor is Chalabi likely to be able to accomplish anything by force of arms. His followers, mostly exiles like himself, armed and trained by the US, number less than 700. Compare that to the 10,000-man army of the Supreme Assembly for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, headed by the Tehran-based Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, which has been vocal in saying that the Americans should leave the country quickly. That means that if Chalabi wants to make his way in Iraq he will have to rely on US military forces. But that is certain to cement his reputation among Iraqis as a tool of the Americans; not something that will do him much good, unless he prefers being known as the Karzai of Iraq, a la Hamad Karzai in Afghanistan.

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