Bernard Lewis, the great and humane Middle East scholar, says that Chalabi is the best hope in this historic, perilous, and pivotal period for Iraq.
OTOH many pundits are attacking him. E.g., Maureen Dowd wrote
She also accused conservatives of “protecting their interests by backing a shady expat puppet.”
A defence to the embezzlement accusation of is offered.
My own feeling is that those in Iraq with leadership experience will be Ba’athists and their supporters. So we will have to look outside the country for new leadership with democratic values.
Chalabi has been outside Iraq throughout Saddam’s rule. He has leadership experience, and he has been an opponent of the Ba’ath Party. It appears that is supported by the Defence Dept. and the right, and he is opposed by the State Dept. and the left. I do not know why he’s a polarizing figure.
Where has he demonstrated any appreciation for (or interest in) Democracy?
I suspect that the opposition he has encountered is closely tied to the recognition that he is perceived in that region as lacking in honesty and in desiring power for personal gain.
Even if Chalabi was “framed” (a point I find unlikely in terms of the Guardian’s story Financial scandal claims hang over leader in waiting), the perception in the region will still taint him. Having the U.S. secretly fly him into the country further puts the stamp of “puppet” on him. (By my reading, I am sure that he has no intention of being a U.S. puppet; I suspect, rather, that he simply wants the power (and graft?) for himself.)
Chalabi was cutoff from State Department funding when he couldn’t account for tens of millions of US taxpayers dollars. Before he was cutoff, but after misappropriations of money were suspected, the State Department hired accountants etc for Chalabi to help him. Chalabi has an advanced degree in mathematics and ran a bank. Surely he can balance books. I suspect that this has some bearing on the SD’s take on Chalabi.
It’s worth noting that the Swiss don’t trust him with money either because of fallout and shoddy accounting practices that became evident in other businesses that were owned by him or his immediate family memebers. Apparently, loans were granted by Petra Bank to Chalabi family businesses, ( gold and currency exchanges). Some of these businesses had to be liquidated by the Swiss. The loaned money wasn’t in those businesses either.
Jordanians had to foot the bill to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even if this was an elaborate scam to incriminate a friend of the Jordanian royal family, the taint of scandal is strongly upon him in the ME. He’s not a candidate who is trusted.
How could the US have “secretly” flown him into Iraq, givem that the trip was reported in the media?
AFAIK, the trip was reported in the media after the fact. There was a program that was underway to train Iraqi intermediaries to assist the US troops in post-war Iraq that was suddenly halted. So I suppose that the reference to secrecy is related to this
The trip was not announced in advance, (despite the fact that he heads the INC), and it was not reported until he began showing up in meetings in Iraq. It also appears, (although I have not seen this explicitly stated), that he was flown directly to Baghdad by the military while most other “civilian” visitors arrive in Kuwait and make the trip north over the highways.
While Chalabi has said that he doesn’t want a leadership role in the Iraqi government, the INC has been touted as the core of the new Iraqi army and apparently has an agreemet w/ the US military to recieve all of the former Iraqi armie’s arms and equipment. The “Mayor of Baghdad” is reportedly an INC member.
Chalabi does want to have a hand in setting up the new Iraqi reegime and army and he does want US taxpayers dollars destined to go to the rebuilding of Iraq to go through his hands.
I watched a press conference with Kanan Makiya last night. Someone has asked him if there was a smear campaign in effect against Chalabi at present; Makiya said of course there is, there has been a smear campaign against the INC and all of its members, ongoing. It’s two-fold. One the one hand they are dismissed by the “elites” for being outsiders whom no one will accept, or the matter of the previous scandal, and on the other to the Muslim world it is suggested they are focusing on things like homosexual rights in the INC…maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but reported like that it’s not meant as a nod of approval. The State Department doesn’t trust him…or maybe its that the State Department doesn’t think he’s “palatable” enough for the Arab League, that Chalabi doesn’t their profile and could be a polarizing figure. Hmm.
The more I see of INC members, the more impressed I am with their vision and committment to Iraq, which does not necessarily mean “pro-US” in everything they do. I do not think there is a better choice to lead the efforts to build Iraq national unity than from the INC. Individual members may have individual faults…at this time, I don’t see Chalabi actually in charge of anything.
“Ahmad Chalabi: Best Hope for Iraq or Shady Expat Puppet?”
Are those the only choices?
He sure looks a bit like a “shady expat” although I don’t know about the puppet part. He claims he’s not a candidate for anything. Yeah, if you believe that, there’s this bridge over the Euphrates I hear is for sale…
Are there any Kurdish Shi’a married to a Sunni Arab who wasn’t associated with the Ba’ath party? That’s the guy I’m rooting for.
Chalabi essentially hasn’t been in Iraq since 1958, which for some raises questions on how ‘in touch’ he may be with the country. According to Molly Ivins, “*n 1992, he was convicted on multiple counts of embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars in Jordan after the failure of his bank there. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison. He escaped from Jordan, reportedly in the trunk of a car, and wound up in London.”
NOT the guy who’d get my vote for leading a democratic Iraq. Even worse, some have proposed that (instead of the whole country) he be in charge of FINANCES. Come on.
My very offhand take on all this is, “What are we doing, picking a leader for the Iraqis?” I really don’t know shit about Chalabi, but I understand there are a half-dozen or so expat Iraqi groups; by picking the leader of one such group, taking him under our wing, flying him over there (I assume; he was in Iraq awfully quickly after Baghdad fell), etc., we’ve chosen amongst them, rather than letting the Iraqi people do that. That just isn’t the right way to handle this.
I realize someone has to be ‘in charge’ right now, but here’s my take on that:
Either (a) that’s what Jay Garner is for, and while he gets the country operational again, the leaders of the expat groups, and any Iraqis who want to put their names forward, should compete equally to take over once he’s gone; or (b) Chalabi should be the guy in charge, but specifically as an interim-only leader, to run things for, say, eighteen months, then hand over the government to a democratically-elected leader.
The main thing is, it’s not for us to decide whether he’s the ‘best hope’ for Iraq in anything besides a very short-term capacity. If he wants to be the real deal, then he should renounce any special association with the US government, and take his chances with all the other would-be Iraqi leaders.
Agreed. But then again, the US hand-picked Karzai in Afghanistan. It’s not for American to pick Iraq’s leaders, but I think that’s going to become a VERY tricky situation shortly, since I think the new Iraq will be a theocracy, and people may live to regret that.
A brief bio of Chalabi shows there’s more than one reason for the lack of confidence expressed by his critics.
Chalabi is the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC)
Chalabi was born in 1945. His family is an oligarchic Shi’a family with close ties to the Hashemite
monarchy installed by British imperial authorities in Iraq after World War I. Chalabi’s
grandfather served in nine various Iraqi cabinet positions, his father was a cabinet officer and
president of the Iraqi senate, and his mother ran political salons that catered to Iraq’s elite.
In 1958 a coalition of army officers and the Iraqi Communist Party led a revolution that toppled
King Faisal II. The Chalabis left.
Ahmed Chalabi has spent most of his life outside Iraq.
Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States. He attended MIT
earned a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He taught math at the American
University of Beirut. In 1977, Chalabi went to Amman Jordan at the invitation of Crown Prince
Hassan of Jordan to establish the Petra Bank. Petra bank became the second-largest commercial
bank in Jordan.
Jordan’s Central Bank Governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, describes what happened to Petra bank like this:
Jordan eventually had to pump hundreds of millions into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. Jordan then arrested Petra’s chief currency trader. According to a 1989 article in the Financial Times, to avoid arrest Ahmed Chalabi fled the country “under mysterious circumstances.”
(Tougher than how the US dealt with Enron’s execs)
Reports are that numerous small buisness people who had for the first time trusted a bank lost all and committed suicide.
Jordan seized the Petra Bank under martial law, and arrested its chief currency trader. Jordan then used its central bank to pump $164 million into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. Chalabi reportedly got away with more than $70 million.
INC spokesman, Zaab Sethna, said that King Hussein of Jordan executed a politically motivated
coup against Chalabi in coordination with Iraq because Chalabi was “using the bank to fund [Iraqi]
opposition groups and learning a lot about illegal arms transfers to Saddam.”
Whether or not this is true, it’s undisputed that Petra Bank, went bust and somewhere in the neighborhoood of $300 million in depositors’ accounts vanished.
Chalabi moved to London and founded the Iraqi National congress.
In the early nineties the INC had headquarters, a radio station and a small army in the Kurdish
territory in northern Iraq that the US protected. The CIA spent more than $100 million with the
INC being a primary beneficiary. Chalabi says the INC received $15 million or less.
The INC attempted an offensive against the Iraqi army in March 1995. This ended with death or
imprisonment for hundreds, or thousands, of Iraqis. Chalabi blamed the CIA. Chalabi said the
problems were due to the CIA’s infighting about whether an opposition group dominated by Kurds
and Shiites could be effective in Iraq.
October 1996, the INC was ousted from Iraq when the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) asked
Saddam Hussein for help in taking over territory held by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The Iraqi army eliminated all INC bases in the north. More than 100 INC officials and soldiers
were executed. We, the U.S. government, brought 7,000 of them to America.
The INC’s tragic downfall and more allegations that Chalabi misused/ embezzled money
have left Chalabi without much support. ”In a classified report, CIA has reportedly concluded that Chalabi has little popular support among the Iraqi people.”
A quote from before October 1996 is telling:
"A lot of people are fed up with him. He does not listen to anybody," Zubair Humadi, an
independent Iraqi opposition figure who participated in the INC’s founding meetings. “He ran the INC into the ground.” Farhad Barzani, the Kurdish KDP’s Washington representative, said Chalabi left “a lot of debts,” delayed payment to some INC officials when he left northern Iraq and refused to disclose details about the INC’s finances to its members. link
U.S. officials suspended funding to the INC in January 2002 because it failed to account for tens
of millions of dollars in U.S. aid. According to the US state department an audit of the group had
revealed serious “financial management and internal control weaknesses” in its handling of the U.S. funds.link
The Pentagon took over payments to the INC.
According to theBBC in 2002 Chalabi is quoted by the German weekly Die Zeit as having said
“Personally, I will not run for any office, and I am not seeking any positions. My job will end with the liberation of Iraq from Saddam’s rule."
The Beeb also quotes the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan as saying Mr Chalabi and the INC “are failures and are not even qualified to run a grocery shop”.
In the past week, we, (the American military), flew Chalabi and 700 of his troops from northern
Iraq to Nasiriyah. The Iraq National Congress said the troops are designated the 1st Battalion of
Free Iraqi Forces and are “integrated alongside American troops,” under Gen. Tommy Franks.
Senior administration officials said that Chalabi may have tapped the Badr Brigade, an
Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group.
The current plan is for Mr Chalabi to take over from Gen Franks once a conference of Iraqi
opposition leaders could be convened.
Even though the US has specifically said on a number of occasions that they wanted Iraqis to choose their own government and that we are not trying to elevate one figure over another we have decided that the Iraqi National Congress headed by Ahmed Chalabi will be: “core of the new Iraqi army once Iraq is free” and apparently have an agreement with the INC that they “will receive all the weapons captured from the Iraqi army.” We may not determine who the political leader of post-occupation Iraq will be, but we have already decided who the legitimate military force of Iraq will be. There is at least a small possibility that the INC will be able will be able to play the US recognition as the legitimate armed forces for Iraq, the US funding of the INC, ($8 million a year) and all of the weapons of the Iraqi army to its advantage in some clever, unforseeable way. :rolleyes:
The INC has suffered major credibility problems in the US, the Middle East in general and in Iraq specifically. In the US, the CIA and the State Department have concerns about tens of millions of US taxpayers’ money that went to the INC under Chalabi’s direction but is now unaccounted for. They are also seen by the State Department and the CIA as lacking any real support in Iraq. The INC has“replied that its most crucial support is meant to be invisible: intelligence networks and discreet undergrounds…” (Umm…riiiight. Yeah, that’s the ticket. And they’re so discrete that even the CIA can’t know about them.) The INC also has credibility problems as a fighting force.
In Iraq the INC is known for its disastrous CIA backed campaign againts Saddam
Hussein. Two of the most prominent Kurish groups, Kurdistan Democratic Party
(KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), along with a number of other
opposition groups, pulled out of the INC as a result. Here’s some interesting snippets
from report of the INC’s first few days back in Iraq:
What duties are we counting on these 700 some odd people who are the “core of the new Iraqi army”?
Richard N. Perle and former CIA director R. James Woolsey try to counter observations
of these obvious faults by saying that Chalabi’s “experience outside Iraq and his longtime commitment to the overthrow of Hussein and to other administration goals in the Middle East make him well-suited to play a leading role.” I’m saying that if we were to try to establish some sort of a puppet regime to extend imperialistic hegemony, it mightlook just like this.
Oh, no…not political advantage. You’re making him out to be our hand-picked President already. And if Molly Ivins hates him, he’s just gone up in my estimation.
So does anything else the US supports. By itself, this doesn’t say much.
So to those who would oppose Chalabi taking over leadership of Iraq, who would you propose? Saying “we should let the Iraqis choose their own leader” seems foolish in the short run, as I can’t imagine Iraqis holding anything resembling a successful democratic election at this point.
Personally, I like RTFirefly’s choice B - letting Chalabi serve as leader for now, until a decent government can be cobbled together, then allowing the Iraqis to choose.
As to the OP proper, while I think Chalabi’s past is fairly suspect, I hardly think him a puppet, and I’ve yet to see anyone better for the role.
Jeff