The man who helped convince the United States to invade Iraq has spent
the last decade in the political wilderness. But now, with his country in
chaos, he could be its next leader.
BY JANE ARRAF from Baghdad
Ahmad Chalabi
Outside the steel doors and high walls of what was once a country estate
on the outskirts of Baghdad, trash is piled along dusty streets marked with
concrete blast barriers. In large swaths of the country, Sunni fighters intent
on erasing Iraq's borders to create a sweeping Islamic state battle Iraqi
soldiers and Shiite militiamen. Inside, in the more refined world he has willed
into being, Ahmad Chalabi ponders his political resurrection.
"The politicians believe this is business as usual -- it is
not," he says in an interview with Foreign
Policy, while leaning back in the embrace of a Danish-designed chair
made in Baghdad from the reclaimed teak doors of old houses. "Iraq has
never faced dissolution since its creation until now. This is the first time
Iraq faces dissolution on two fronts -- the Kurds and the Sunnis."
Chalabi is dressed in a black T-shirt, black parachute pants, and black
suede shoes with no socks. He sits surrounded by Iraqi paintings -- at
Baghdad's declining number of art galleries, his purchases alone help keep some
artists afloat. In the garden in the evening, fans with water reservoirs spray
a cooling, rose-scented mist. He is renovating his swimming pool, where
neoconservative American officials used to swim when he was still a darling of
President George W. Bush's administration. Now, the U.S. Embassy across town is
evacuating its nonessential staff, and the remaining Foreign Service officers
aren't allowed even to cross the street.
To many in the West, Chalabi, 69, is still the political operator who
convinced the Bush administration that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had
weapons of mass destruction, paving the way for the U.S.-led invasion of the
country. But inside an Iraq dangerously on the verge of splintering, that
invasion is almost ancient history. After almost a decade of being sidelined,
the man who could not win a seat in parliament in 2005 and whose name once
inspired insults scrawled on Baghdad walls has emerged as a serious contender
to replace Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
In fact, he believes he can save Iraq.
"The facts, you see, add cumulatively to my credibility with all
sections of society," he says.
"These
people proposing me to be prime minister -- [they are] not only among the
Shiites but among the Sunnis and the Kurds."
Those "facts," as Chalabi sees them, are a proven record of
reducing government corruption and the economic qualifications to repair Iraq's
bleeding economy. Now, he has his sights set on crushing the Islamic State --
formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a jihadist organization
that has recently seized vast areas of territory in the north and west of the
country. To do that, he says the government needs to mend ties with the
country's Sunni community.
"The way to defeat ISIS, in my view the only way, is first of all
-- after a good government is formed -- you have to issue a law of national
reconciliation to win over the Sunnis in a serious way."
In June, Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, fell to ISIS, which
rebranded itself as the Islamic State and declared the creation of a caliphate.
With the Sunni jihadists on their doorstep, Iraqi political leaders are still
wrangling over who will form a new government after elections in April. One of
the only things they seem to agree on is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki
should not be given a third term in office.
Chalabi, a secular Shiite, has not been wasting his time while in the
political wilderness. In the past decade, he has forged strong ties with
hard-line Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, as well as the major Kurdish factions
and key Sunni leaders. Close to Iran and apparently now tolerated by the United
States, he has emerged as perhaps the ultimate compromise candidate in a
country fatally lacking in political compromise.
Part of Chalabi's proposed reconciliation would be reviewing the cases
of thousands of prisoners, most of them Sunnis, who have been arrested under
sweeping anti-terrorism laws and held in jail without charge, or long past
orders for their release. Chalabi says he would also appoint a judicial
committee to review cases where people have been sentenced on the basis of
coerced confessions.
Then he would turn his attention to Iraq's bleeding economy and combat
corruption. The former banker proposes a team of forensic auditors -- perhaps
headed by the American former special inspector for Iraq reconstruction, Stuart
Bowen -- to review contracts and contracting procedures in order to reduce
Iraq's staggering corruption. Chalabi also points to his experience in
government in 2005, when he says he exposed a $1.2 billion contracting scandal and proposed a committee to oversee large
contracts. "For one year there was not one instance of corruption in the
entire contracting process of the Iraqi government," he says -- a claim
difficult to verify.
Perhaps one of the most dramatic aims of a man inextricably associated
with laws punishing former Baath party members would be to roll back de-Baathification, which he now argues has
been perverted from its original purpose of dismantling Saddam's party
institutions to being used as retribution for political purposes.
"It became the common wisdom that Sunnis hate me because of this de-Baathification,"
Chalabi says. But given the even harsher crackdown that followed his departure,
he claims, "They are having nostalgia about de-Baathification."
* * *
But
before Chalabi turns to the future, he has a litany of grievances
against those he believes have wronged him in the past. While several former
Bush administration officials still champion his political ambitions, top on his list
of adversaries is the man the United States appoint to lead the occupation
authority following the 2003 invasion: Paul Bremer.
"Bremer never liked me from the beginning," Chalabi says,
blaming a2003 editorial he published in the Wall Street Journal, in which he thanked the United
States for toppling Saddam Hussein but warned it against staying in Iraq. He
blames the United States -- and U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi -- of excluding him
from Ayad Allawi's interim government, formed in 2004.
Chalabi, who was paid by the CIA for six years as part of a futile
covert effort to topple Saddam Hussein, also bats away claims that he was
responsible for the incorrect intelligence about the Iraqi regime's purported
WMD stockpiles. He says his role was limited to putting informants in touch
with the CIA for the agency to evaluate on its own. A congressionally appointed
committee discounted his connection to the now-discredited source
known as "Curveball," later identified as Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed
Alwan al-Janabi, whose claim that Saddam was operating mobile biological
weapons laboratories was used by the Bush administration to publicly make the
case for war. Chalabi says the widespread claim in the media of his connection
to Janabi was payback for ruffling feathers at the State Department and White
House.
"What happened is that the narrative of war that Bush based his
plan on fell apart," he says. "Who is at fault? I am. It's an easy
target -- a foreigner in Iraq who did things in Washington with questionable
methods whom they didn't like. It's easy."
However, Chalabi is still happy to take credit for his key role in
bringing the United States to Iraq. After being cut loose by the CIA, he went
to Washington in 1997 to lobby Congress to back attempts to overthrow Saddam. A
year later, the Iraqi Liberation Act, which made it U.S. policy to support
regime change, was signed into law.
"The main thing we did was we made the Iraq issue an American
political issue inside the United States," Chalabi says. "Of course
this gets me great ill will with the American bureaucrats, so every chance they
get, they dump on me."
* * *
Even
by the mercurial standards of Iraqi politics, Chalabi has had a dramatic
ride. Less
than a year after the beginning of the war, he was given a privileged seat near
first lady Laura Bush at President Bush's 2004 State of the Union address. Four
months later, U.S. Special Forces raided his office following accusations that
he sent sensitive files to Iran and forged currency with plates stolen from the
Iraqi mint. The charges were later dropped. He is still, however, sentenced in
absentia to prison with hard labor in Jordan, where he is held responsible for
the collapse of the kingdom's second-largest bank in 1989. Chalabi maintains he
was made the scapegoat for that collapse.
The passage of the years has not managed to erase everyone's suspicions
about him. As one former Western diplomat who has dealt with him put it,
"I think [Chalabi's new popularity] is part of Iraq's long slide into the
abyss."
But Chalabi believes that recent events have validated his decision in
the years following the invasion -- much bemoaned in Washington at the time --
to pursue cooperation with Iran.
"Are they not cooperating with Iran?" Chalabi says of the
United States. "Are they not accepting Iranian interference in the war
against ISIS? Why was that a bad thing to do in 2003 to 2004 and why is it a
great thing now? Who was right and who was wrong?"
During his years out of political power, Chalabi launched a sort of
economic salon -- twice-weekly seminars bringing together technical experts to
thrash out economic and political issues -- that has burnished his credentials
as a technocrat able to rise above sectarian issues.
In what was once a grain cellar for his family's ancestral farm -- and
is now lined with gleaming-white concrete and outfitted with a stage and
audiovisual system amid the abstract art -- a rotating cast of academics,
policy makers, and industrialists still gathers for discussions of issues such
as the role of the central bank, how to revive industry, and how to combat
corruption.
Chalabi mostly listens -- as he has been listening for the past decade.
"Every week he meets tens if not hundreds of technocrats and
academics, and he tries to find the right people," says an independent
Iraqi analyst who has attended his seminars and, like many, describes him as
"brilliant."
"When the Americans turned against him, he became alone -- he was
only respected by the Kurds," says the analyst. "Everybody was ignoring
him, so he used that in a very clever way -- he did not want to become a
puppet. I think he knows the only way to have his star shine is when there is
nationwide disagreement."
Chalabi, perhaps disingenuously, says he isn't seeking the prime minister's
job.
"What's the point if there's no plan?" he asks. "To put
Iraq back together is very difficult. The points of this plan will be opposed
violently by some Shiites because their concept is they are in power.... But we
can't conquer Sunni lands with Shiite militias. That's one thing we need -- a
plan to stitch Iraq back together."
With Iraq unraveling and after a decade waiting in the wings, this might
be Chalabi's chance to implement that plan.
·
* This report was published
first in Foreign Policy on 10/07/2014
· * Jane Arraf was the CNN’s Baghdad
bureau chief after the American invasion of Iraq
