Chalabi is equally unpopular in some Washington fiefdoms. State Department officials and CIA agents have loathed him for years, raising questions about subjects ranging from his expense accounts to the intelligence he supplied on Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. Even Chalabi’s friends and patrons at the Pentagon may be having doubts. Privately, some of Chalabi’s aides complain their old buddies in the office of the secretary of Defense have forgotten them.
So you might think Chalabi is discredited and finished. But then you’d be wrong–very wrong. On the contrary, the former exile leader has insinuated himself into several of the most powerful positions inside occupied Iraq. This MIT-trained mathematician, a great judge of political odds, knows just how to play both ends against the middle.
A huge stain on Chalabi’s reputation, widely known in Iraq, is his conviction in absentia for massive bank fraud in neighboring Jordan during the 1980s. (Chalabi denies the charges and claims Saddam Hussein had a hand in framing him.) Never mind all that. Chalabi is now head of the Governing Council’s economic and finance committee. As such he has overseen the appointment of the minister of oil, the minister of finance, the central bank governor, the trade minister, the head of the trade bank and the designated managing director of the largest commercial bank in the country. For the moment, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer writes the big checks and can veto policies. But all that will change on June 30, the Bush administration’s self-imposed deadline for returning sovereignty to an Iraqi government. “Ahmad is positioning himself,” says one cabinet minister. “He is a master tactician.”
Chalabi’s other major source of strength is the De-Baathification Commission, which he heads. Its mandate–to work against former members of Saddam’s regime and his Baath Party–is so wide-ranging that even one of Chalabi’s aides calls it “a government within the government.” It’s empowered to oversee educational reform, track down Saddam’s funds, purge senior Baathists from government jobs and occasionally reinstate those who can convince the commission they weren’t complicit in Saddam’s crimes. The backbone of the operation is a vast collection of secret documents seized from Saddam’s files. To process them, according to one Chalabi aide, the De-Baathification Commission has 50 document scanners. There are only 20 other scanners in all the rest of the government.
Chalabi’s latest feints have been toward the powerful Shiite religious leadership in Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. (Chalabi has long had close ties to the Iranian mullahs, too.) He voiced support for Islamic law, then had a representative of his vote against it last week. As members of the Governing Council struggled to reach agreement on the “fundamental law,” or interim constitution that was supposed to be approved by Feb. 28, Chalabi’s representative then joined seven other Shiite council members who stormed out of the meeting. “Chalabi is riding the Sistani wave,” says one of his critics on the council.
Both Iraqi and U.S. officials in Baghdad say it’s almost certain that on June 30, the government that does receive sovereignty–and the purse strings–will be either the current, appointed council, or some variation on it. Will Chalabi and his people still be in place, still powerful? You can just about bank on it.
