Ensconced in one of his family homes in Baghdad after last year’s invasion (his “Free Iraq Forces”, notoriously lawless, ultimately seized 45 buildings in the Iraqi capital alone), Chalabi soon began manoeuvring to shed his prevalent image as an American stooge. By September he was becoming openly critical of US occupation policy, while his aides scorned Bremer as “anti-Muslim and anti-Arab”.
Though some of his American friends appreciated his need to strike an independent pose, others were less charmed. In November, according to one senior member of the Governing Council, President Bush told King Abdullah of Jordan: “You can piss on Chalabi.”
In November he secured control of the Governing Council’s de-Baathification committee, giving him arbitary power over the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of former members of Saddam’s party.
He was also taking steps to bolster both his finances (not that he was ever poor, even after his Jordanian escapade) and his control over the nascent Iraqi state apparatus. No one has ever questioned his considerable executive skills and drive, which he swiftly deployed in key areas.
Securing the influential position of chairman of the finance committee of the Governing Council, he inserted loyal acolytes into commanding positions in the economy, including most importantly the Minister of Finance, (a former waiter in an Amman restaurant), and the Minister of Oil, whose father, a genial cleric named Mohammed Bahr al-Uloom, he had once helped with a mortgage back in the days of exile in London.
His influence over the oil ministry, custodian of Iraq’s incalculable oil wealth, was amply demonstrated when he orchestrated the removal of a senior but inconveniently principled official in charge of oil sales. Oil traders took further note when his right hand man, Nabil Mousawi, began travelling to Opec meetings with the minister.
Around Baghdad last winter, it was easy to find businessmen who would grumble that “Ahmed wants it all”. Few believed that there was any serious rift between him and the Americans, despite the embarrassment over non-existent weapons of mass destruction, especially when would-be bidders on contracts for the new Iraqi army were told by American coalition authority officials that they had to go through Ahmed Chalabi, or when Abdul Huda Farouki, his close friend and business associate, secured the main supply contract for the new army.
While he still deployed his charm and articulate delivery in Washington when necessary, Chalabi’s arrogance, never quiescent, was rising to the fore on his native ground, where he was behaving increasingly like a warlord.
Last January, for example, he directed his 70-man personal bodyguard to go and shoot up the offices of Baghdad’s new cellphone company down the street from his house. The phone company security guards had allegedly been disrespectful to his nephew’s driver, so he casually issued a command to “educate them” and retired to take a nap. The affray only ended after 7,000 rounds had been fired and four telephone company guards seriously wounded.
As the Iraqi situation deteriorated in spring, Chalabi came under increasing blame in the US media over his role in supplying the fraudulent intelligence that had originally justified the ill-fated invasion. In vain he protested, not totally unreasonably, that it should have been up to the CIA to analyse intelligence — he had merely provided the defectors.
At home, meanwhile, he was hitching his star to that of the Shia hero Ayatollah Sistani, echoing the venerable cleric’s call for early elections while Chalabi aides boasted of his certain victory in any nationwide poll. (Iraqi opinion polls pegged his unpopularity as three times greater than that of Saddam Hussein.) As his relationship with Washington deteriorated, his enemies there moved to cut off his $340,000 monthly Pentagon stipend and leaked news that intelligence had detected him passing sensitive American security information to his old chums in Iran.
Inexorably, Chalabi migrated further and further into the Shia sectarian camp, casting himself as the Ian Paisley of Iraqi Shia politics. After the horrific bombing of Shia pilgrims in Kerbala and Baghdad in March, a radio address by one of his aides came close to threatening Sunnis with civil war.
More recently, his conduct has become increasingly threatening in the eyes of the occupation, especially after UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi made it clear that there would be no place for Chalabi in a post-June 30 Iraqi government.
In response he stepped up efforts to discredit the UN by publicising details of the UN-administered Oil-for-Food scandal and simultaneously recruited a “Supreme Shia Council”, modelled on a similar institution in Lebanon born during that country’s bloody civil war. Chalabi’s council includes not only some allies from the Governing Council, but also Iraqi Hezbollah and a faction of the Dawa party considered close to the rebel cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr.
According to one Iraqi source familiar with this undertaking, Chalabi has been telling adherents that Brahimi is part of a Sunni conspiracy to deny the Shia their rights.
“Since Brahimi excluded Chalabi from any prospect of a place in the new government,” a former senior INC official pointed out to me yesterday, Chalabi had entered “a very destructive phase,” mobilising forces to make sure the UN initiative — details of which Brahimi is due to announce shortly — fails.
This former Chalabi associate also points out that “he knows that, sooner or later, Hojattoleslam al-Sadr is going to be killed, that will leave tens, hundreds of thousands of his followers adrift, looking for a new leader. If Ahmed plays the role of victim after this (Thursday’s raid) he can take on that role.”
It seems a strange journey for the man who formerly impressed Western acquaintances with his encyclopaedic knowledge of subjects such as medieval Japan and higher mathematics to end up following in the footsteps of an uncouth clerical mob-leader. But Ahmed Chalabi has never been short of surprises.
US ACCUSED
Baghdad: Iraq’s interim Governing Council blamed the coalition yesterday for the raids on Ahmed Chalabi’s home and offices. “The Council unanimously condemned the raids on Mr Chalabi’s home and holds the coalition authorities responsible,” said Samir al-Askari, a council representative.
Mr al-Askari said that the Governing Council would hold talks with Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, to ensure that “such incidents do not happen again”. Mr al-Askari contradicted claims by General Richard Myers, the head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the raids had been ordered by the Iraqi interior minister. (AFP)
