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Posted Friday, May 21, 2004

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The Bush people seem to really believe that . . . if Iraq becomes independent, it will disappear as a huge story. The focus of the public will change, people will say 'well, that's the Iraqis' own business,' and it won't be in the headlines after that.

San Francisco Chronicle


San Francisco, Friday, May 21, 2004

 

Pals in power give him leverage on U.S. effort to transfer sovereignty

Chalabi keeps network, could thwart U.S. goals despite fall from grace

by Robert Collier,
Chronicle Staff Writer

THE raid by Iraqi police and U.S. agents of the home and political headquarters of controversial politician Ahmed Chalabi seems to mark the dramatic downfall of the man who has long been Washington's closest ally in Iraq.

But Chalabi's days in power may not be over. During the past year, he has amassed a large web of influence and control that stretches from the oil industry to the banking system to the purges of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

Analysts say that unless the Bush administration moves to dismantle his empire, Chalabi will continue controlling much of Iraq's politics from behind the scenes, and he could seriously disrupt American plans for turning over nominal sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30 [2004].

"There's widespread concern among objective observers that (Chalabi) is a highly distrusted and polarizing individual, whose support among the Iraqi public is extremely low in public opinion polls," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University who last month finished a three-month stint as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run occupation power in Iraq.

"He has certain levers of power," said Diamond. "He's a shrewd player, and much of that power comes from the ministries that he controls."

As head of the Iraqi Governing Council's economic and finance committee, Chalabi has been able to install his relatives or friends as the minister of oil, the minister of finance, the central bank governor, the trade minister, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of Iraq's largest commercial bank. These connections reportedly have allowed firms controlled by his allies to make millions in government contracts.

But Chalabi's power in Washington has been even greater than it is in Baghdad.

Chalabi, who has degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, has long allied himself with U.S. neoconservatives who advocated an American invasion to overthrow Hussein.

These allies -- ranging from Vice President Dick Cheney to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, State Department official John Bolton and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle -- relied heavily on Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress to produce evidence about Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This information formed the central justification behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Much of the evidence eventually proved false, and some U.S. officials now conclude that it was fabricated, presumably by Chalabi's U.S.-funded organization of spies, exiles and hangers-on.

After the fall of Hussein's regime, Chalabi and his U.S.-trained militia swept into Iraq aboard American military planes. He was quickly given status as Washington's favorite, and he was widely expected to become Iraq's first post-Hussein president.

He was given control of the entire archive of the Hussein regime's secret documents, as well as the so-called de-Baathification process. The powers of the De-Baathification Commission, which Chalabi chairs, are so wide-ranging that it is often called a government within the government.

The commission singled out tens of thousands of former Baath Party members to be fired from their government jobs and has allowed Chalabi to replace them with his followers. It oversees educational reform, tracks down Hussein's funds stashed in foreign banks and compiles lists of pro-Hussein businessmen who are then blacklisted and banned from government contracting.

His nephew Salem Chalabi is in charge of the war-crimes tribunal that is planning to try Hussein and other top former regime officials. His personal militia, paid for almost entirely with U.S. funds, has become the best- financed and best-armed Iraqi force in Baghdad.

Even mundane details show his power. To process the vast mountains of documents, the commission has 50 document scanners. There are only 20 other scanners in all the rest of the Iraqi government.

In recent months, U.S. officials raised repeated questions about allegations that Chalabi was using his empire to enrich himself. It is not the first time he has been accused of corruption -- he is a fugitive from justice in Jordan. In 1992, a court there convicted him in absentia of fraud and embezzlement in the collapse of a major Jordanian bank that he directed and sentenced him to 22 years of hard labor.

But Chalabi's downfall may have been in opposing efforts by the United Nations to broker a face-saving deal to transfer nominal sovereignty to a new Iraqi government by June 30.

Chalabi turned against his American sponsors -- and especially against U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, whom the Bush administration is counting on to finesse a deal.

Brahimi is widely known to distrust Chalabi and to want him to have no role in the new government. For his part, Chalabi has waged a full-throated political war against Brahimi. In recent weeks he had appeared to be having some success in encouraging opposition to Brahimi's negotiations between rival Iraqi factions.

Chalabi also has created an international scandal by producing documents that he claims prove a high-ranking U.N. official received millions of dollars in bribes from Hussein. But Chalabi has refused to let U.S. or U.N. officials examine the documents to verify their authenticity.

"The puzzle is why the Bush administration acted now, if there were rumors of financial improprieties back in December [2003]," said Juan Cole, a Middle East history professor at the University of Michigan who edits Informed Comment, an authoritative Web log on Iraq.

Cole answered his own question: "You act on them now to neutralize Chalabi's opposition to the Brahimi plan. The Bush people seem to really believe that his re-election depends on this transition of sovereignty. There seems to be the theory that if Iraq becomes independent, it will disappear as a huge story. The focus of the public will change, people will say 'well, that's the Iraqis' own business,' and it won't be in the headlines after that. So if Chalabi is in the way, (Bush officials) absolutely have to get rid of him."

Cole said the Bush administration must act quickly to remove Chalabi from the Governing Council and dismantle the rest of his network. "Chalabi is a powerful chameleon, and his power won't go away" if the U.S. actions against him end with Thursday's raid, he added. "We'll see whether this continues."

 

Robert Fisk reports: Video pictures of US helicopter crew shooting wounded men have been censored by British and European TV (see below)
Atrocity-galleries from a "bloodless war": Thousands of images of the Iraqi victims of Bush and Blair
How to Shoot a Wounded Iraqi "That was awesome, let's do it again!" [video, WMV, zip file, 1 MB]

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