|  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, 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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