Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile close to many U.S. neoconservatives, headed the Iraqi National Congress
(INC)—the exile party wooed by the likes of Paul
Wolfowitz and Richard Perle that was
accused of feeding false intelligence to the United States about Saddam Hussein's regime. A Shiite
Muslim born to a wealthy banking family in Iraq, Chalabi left the country with his family when he was
12. Although he spent most of his life in the West, he remained closely involved in Mideast affairs.
In 1977 he founded the scandal-plagued Petra Bank in Jordan (which collapsed in 1990), and in the late
1970s he also became a key member of the anti-Saddam exile community. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq
in 2003, Chalabi returned and became a high-profile government figure in Iraq accused of collaborating
with Iranian officials.
Chalabi currently serves as the head of a government services committee, which according to a McClatchy
Newspapers report (October 28, 2007) is a "consortium of eight service ministries and two Baghdad
municipal posts that is tasked with bringing services to Baghdad." According to the Los Angeles
Times (November 13, 2007), both Iraqi and U.S. officials consider the position vital to securing
gains made as part of the "surge" effort, which saw tens of thousands of new U.S. troops
deployed in Baghdad to enhance security there and wrest control from insurgents. Chalabi's re-emergence
on the political scene, which occurred when Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki named him to the services
post in October 2007, surprised observers, who pointed to his previous run-ins with U.S. authorities
in Iraq related to his mishandling of previous jobs and connections to Iranian political actors. Asked
why the U.S. government decided to work with Chalabi again, one State Department official told the Los
Angeles Times, "That's a very good question."
Chalabi previously served as head of Iraq's Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, a controversial
body created after then-U.S. proconsul in Iraq Paul
Bremer issued a 2003 decree that was meant to remove thousands of Baath Party members from office.
As the Washington Post reported (January 14, 2007): "The one-and-a-half-page decree, which
was drafted in the Pentagon office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas
J. Feith, banned anyone who had been in the party's top four ranks; it also banned hundreds of
thousands of rank-and-file members from holding senior management positions in government ministries.
Bremer's stated goal was to cleanse Iraq's government of the former president's cronies." The
de-Baathification policy resulted in the firing of thousands of officials, including schoolteachers
and other low-level officials who had become Baath Party members simply to keep their jobs. Critics
of the policy argued that it would add to the already extraordinarily high unemployment rate in Iraq
and potentially increase the number of people willing to join insurgents fighting against U.S. forces
(Washington Post, January 14, 2007).
Bremer, whose track record as proconsul in Iraq has been heavily criticized, tried to blame the de-Baathification problems on Chalabi's office. He wrote in 2006: "The error was that I left the implementation of the policy to a political body within the nascent Iraqi government, where it became a tool of politicians who applied it much more broadly than we had intended. De-Baathification should have been administered by an independent judicial body" (Washington Post, January 14, 2007).
In early 2007, Chalabi, under increasing pressure from the Bush administration to reform the de-Baathification policy, announced that his office would begin readmitting former Baath Party members who had not committed crimes during the Hussein years (Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2007). However, Chalabi's commitment to the reforms remained unclear. In particular, Chalabi has said that a new law on de-Baathification would not contain "a key demand of the U.S. government: a sunset clause that would abolish [his] commission," which would effectively deprive Chalabi of his post. He called the proposal "unconstitutional." Chalabi brushed off questions about U.S. pressure, saying: "We don't feel any pressure" (Washington Post, January 14, 2007).
In the mid-1990s, Chalabi returned to Iraq and through the INC tried to organize an uprising in Kurdish areas of Iraq. The effort failed and hundreds of supporters were killed; Chalabi and many of his INC cohorts fled the country. In 1992, after his Petra Bank folded, Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court for bank fraud. Chalabi has repeatedly insisted that he is innocent and says Petra's failure was orchestrated by Saddam Hussein (BBC News, October 3, 2002).
In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon favored Chalabi as a potential new leader for Iraq. According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon's faith in Chalabi, despite his 45-year absence from Iraq, caused war planners to ignore State Department warnings about the lack of Iraqi public support for Chalabi and to overlook the emergence of a radical, fundamentalist Shiite political base in the country. Said one unnamed official: "They really did believe he is a Shiite leader ... They thought, 'We're set, we've got a Shiite—check the box here.'" Walter P. Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle East affairs, told the Post, "We're flying blind on this. It's a classic case of politics and intelligence. In this case, the political community have [sic] absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much" (Washington Post, April 23, 2003).
In a November 2003 profile, the Post contrasted the views about Chalabi expressed by Bush administration critics like Lang with those of supporters like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and former CIA director James Woolsey. Lang opined that Chalabi was "a fake, one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people"; McCain called him "a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart"; and Woolsey said, "He's a class act" (Washington Post, November 24, 2003).
More than anything, it was Chalabi and the INC's efforts to pass along dubious intelligence to the United States, as well as INC's plank of supporters among neoconservatives, that drove criticism of Chalabi and his group in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.
In his 2005 book Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, journalist George Packer describes the relationship that developed between neoconservatives and high profile Iraqi Shiite exiles during the years leading up to the Iraq War, focusing special attention on high-placed neoconservatives in the Pentagon who were responsible for culling Iraq intelligence at the Office of Special Plans. Arguing that the "convergence of ideas, interests, and affections between certain American Jews and Iraqi Shiites was one of the more curious subplots of the Iraq War," Packer relates how Pentagon neoconservatives like Feith, William Luti, Abram Shulsky, and Michael Rubin actively courted exiles in an effort to build a coalition of like-minded anti-Sunni and anti-Saddam intellectuals—allies who would eventually supply convenient, if erroneous, intelligence channeled through contacts in the INC, in particular Chalabi. Packer quotes Feith, who once told Kanan Makiya, an influential Iraqi exile associated with the INC: "You Shiites in Iraq have a historical opportunity. Do whatever you can—but don't speak about it." Comments Packer: "Not speaking about it fit the Shiite concept of taqiya —dissembling in defense of faith, the sanctioned lying to outsiders that allowed a persecuted religious sect to survive. Taqiya also explained the decoy name and hidden work of the Office of Special Plans, home of that other persecuted sect newly arrived in power, the neoconservatives" (Assassins' Gate, p. 109).
Outside government, writers at neoconservative outlets like the Weekly Standardalso heavily promoted Chalabi and the INC shortly after 9/11 as a potential source for a post-Saddam government. In their 2003 book The War Over Iraq, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Lawrence Kaplan, a writer for the New Republic, argued that "the exile umbrella group, the Iraqi National Congress, is already working on the shape of Baghdad's postwar government" (pp. 95-99). Commenting on this support, the conservative scholars Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke write: "If [Kristol and Kaplan] meant people such as the INC's leader, Ahmed Chalabi, they were talking about a man who had spent more than four decades in exile, whose power base inside the country was untested, and who was entirely dependent on Western patronage." By "Western patronage," Halper and Clarke were referring specifically to the neoconservatives. "Chalabi was an established neoconservative ally of some two decades. He met [Albert] Wohlstetter while studying mathematics at the University of Chicago, who introduced him to Perle in 1985 ... In the 1990s, Chalabi gained political favor with Washington's staunch pro-Israeli think tanks, the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs and JINSA [the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs]. He became a frequent guest at their symposia and drew wide support from key figures with neoconservative connections, such as [Dick] Cheney, [Donald] Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Woolsey" (America Alone, p. 220).
Perle and Wolfowitz proved to be Chalabi's biggest boosters. As early as 1998, Wolfowitz testified in front of the House International Relations Committee that regime change in Iraq was the "only way to rescue the region and the world from the threat" posed by Saddam. Wolfowitz added that the United States should recognize "a provisional government of free Iraq" and that the best place to look for such a government was within the INC (America Alone, pp. 101-102).
Eventually, under pressure from a Republican-controlled Congress and lobbied heavily by neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century, then-President Bill Clinton signed into law the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which for the time made the overthrow of Saddam official U.S. policy and supplied funds for the INC (see Chris Suellentrop, "Ahmed Chalabi: Why Shouldn't a Politician Be President of Iraq?" Slate, April 9, 2003). Commenting on the money the INC received from the United States, the New Yorker's Jane Meyer wrote: "Between 1992 and [May 2004], the U.S. government funneled more than $100 million to the Iraqi National Congress. The current Bush administration gave Chalabi's group at least $39 million. Exactly what the INC provided in exchange for these sums has yet to be fully explained" (New Yorker, June 7, 2004).
In the days immediately following 9/11, Perle stepped in to give Chalabi another boost when he convened a meeting of the Defense Policy Board (DPB), the Pentagon's in-house quasi-think tank then chaired by Perle, to discuss alternative responses to the terrorist attacks. "Extraordinarily, [Perle] invited Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi to take part in the highly classified proceedings" (see Lobe and Flynn, " The Rise and Decline of the Neoconservatives," Right Web Special Report, November 17, 2006). According to Meyer of the New Yorker, "Chalabi's message [to the DPB] ... was to skip any intervention in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had harbored al-Qaida, and to proceed immediately with targeting Iraq. A participant at the meeting, who asked not to be named, recalled that Chalabi made a compelling case that the Americans would have an easy victory there: 'He said there'd be no resistance, no guerrilla warfare from the Baathists, and a quick matter of establishing a government'" (New Yorker, June 7, 2004).
During the lead-up to the war, Chalabi was able to use his many contacts within government to channel erroneous information—which was often disputed by the Central Intelligence Agency—to Bush administration allies who used the information to help justify the invasion of Iraq. As Meyer reported, Chalabi "helped the Bush administration make its case against Saddam, in part by disseminating the notion that the Baathist regime had maintained stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and was poised to become a nuclear power. Although Chalabi developed enemies at the CIA who disputed his intelligence data and questioned his ethics, he forged a close bond with Vice President Dick Cheney and many of the top civilians at the Pentagon" (New Yorker, June 7, 2004).
U.S. journalists, in particular former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, also helped disseminate the bad intel supplied by INC and Chalabi. Miller had sustained close ties with Chalabi for several years, a point she made during a dispute with one of her Times bosses. Recalling the incident, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz wrote: " In 2003, I reported on Miller's spat with the Times 's Baghdad bureau chief, who scolded her for writing about Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi after being notified that someone else would handle the assignment. 'I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper,' Miller wrote in an email" (Washington Post, January 31, 2007). This relationship, however, eventually cast serious doubt on the objectivity and quality of Miller's work. Reported the Post's Marc Fisher: "Judith Miller was caught over and over basically retyping Chalabi without fact checking. The NYT and the profession blew off the complaints [about Miller's reports], even though they were heavily researched and annotated" (Washington Post, January 25, 2007) .
After the invasion, Chalabi quickly installed himself in Iraq with the help of the U.S. military. As Meyer reported: "In early April, 2003, Chalabi was stranded in the desert shortly after U.S. forces airlifted him and several hundred followers into southern Iraq, leaving them without adequate water, food, or transportation" (Washington Post, November 24, 2003). Although he repeatedly denied that he was interested in seeking political office, he began shaping himself as a future leader of the country once Saddam was overthrown. In late 2003, Chalabi visited the United States as a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Although his ostensible goal was to lobby for grants to help Iraq, many observers saw the trip as an effort to boost his profile as a potential Iraqi president. The Bush administration also did its part to boost Chalabi's standing, inviting him as a "special guest" of First Lady Laura Bush to attend the president's January 2004 State of the Union address (White House, January 20, 2004).
But Chalabi faced significant hurdles, the most important being his lack of support in Iraq. As the Post reported in late 2003: "Chalabi's ultimate goal, almost everyone agrees, is to be president of Iraq. But as a politician, he has some grave liabilities. He is an extremely polarizing personality: people tend to love him or hate him. A recent poll of Iraqis showed a 35% unfavorable rating and a 26% favorable rating. Many Iraqis regard him as an outsider, someone who stayed away too long. When he returned with U.S. troops at the start of the war, he had not been to Baghdad since 1958" (Washington Post, November 24, 2003).
Chalabi's self-promotion hit a major snag in May 2004 when his home and office were raided by the U.S. military and Iraqi police in response to allegations that he was spying for Iran. Chalabi blamed the raid on foes within the U.S. government and quipped to one reporter: "It's customary when great events happen that the United States punishes its friends and rewards its enemies" (New Yorker, June 7, 2004). Undaunted, in 2005, Chalabi, then still an INC leader, presented himself as a candidate for prime minister of Iraq. He eventually dropped out of the race, which was one won by Ibrahim Jaafari.
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Affiliations
Iraqi Government: Head of Iraq's Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification; Former Interior Minister (May 2005-January 2006) and Deputy Prime Minister (May 2005-May 2006)
Iraqi National Congress: Head
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: Frequent Guest and Speaker
American University of Beirut: Former Mathematics Professor
Private Sector
Petra Bank (Jordan): Founder, Former Chairman
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ph.D., Mathematics
University of Chicago: Degree in Mathematics
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