Long-Exiled Chalabi Gets His Chance

This is the make-or-break moment for Ahmad Chalabi, the U.S.-educated banker and convicted felon who has both impressed and alienated a string of U.S. administrations by portraying himself as the Spartacus of Iraq, a warrior-politician who could mobilize tens of thousands to oust Saddam Hussein.

Airlifted by the U.S. military Sunday into southern Iraq, he now has a chance to prove his claims. Pentagon allies hope Chalabi (pronounced CHAL-uh-bee) can demonstrate his popularity and emerge as a leading figure -- and possibly the head -- of a transitional authority replacing Hussein. Critics at the State Department and CIA predict that Chalabi and his band of hastily recruited troops will fail to attract widespread support.

No one who has dealt with him is neutral on Chalabi.

Although Chalabi fled Iraq in the 1950s as a youth, his backers view him as the country’s hope in the 21st century. “He’s a man of courage and devotion and honor,” said renowned Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. “I’ve known him for 12 years and the better I get to know him the more I respect him.”

Supporters say he shares with the Bush administration a common vision for a democratic, secular Iraq that encourages free enterprise, eschews extremism and is pro-Western.

Chalabi, a member of Iraq’s majority Shiite Muslim sect, is certainly an unusual blend of the traditional Arab orient and the modern West. Believed to have been born in 1945, he is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics. He has a home in Washington where he once kept a small green leather Koran next to a large book on the architect Le Corbusier on his coffee table.

His detractors portray him as a catalyst for political calamity in postwar Baghdad. “There’s almost no one who would be worse either for Iraq or for the Arab world,” said the foreign minister of one Arab country, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I can’t think of a single Arab country that would really welcome him even as a visitor.”

Government officials from four of the six countries bordering Iraq have cautioned the United States against giving Chalabi too much power. American critics cite as warning signs his conviction in Jordan for bank fraud in the 1980s. They also say his political ambitions and sometimes haughty, imperial ways are flash points for squabbling among the already fractured Iraqi opposition.

Chalabi, leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, has repeatedly said that he has no ambitions beyond liberating Iraq, after which he intends to get out of politics. And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that Chalabi’s presence in southern Iraq was no indication of any special political support for him.

“Clearly, the United States is not going to impose a government on Iraq,” Rumsfeld told reporters. “The Iraqi people are going to sort out what their Iraqi government ought to look like.”

But Chalabi’s detractors in the Bush administration aren’t buying the denials.

“Then how come not one of the many other exiles who want a role in post-Saddam Iraq were also brought in?” asked one administration official who, like many interviewed for this article, asked not to be identified. Some State Department officials in Kuwait were privately furious that Chalabi had been airlifted into southern Iraq, contending it amounted to an unwarranted push to secure him a top role in the postwar government.

“It’s really outrageous,” said one official who requested anonymity. “It means they’re throwing their lot in with these INC guys. It amounts to taking sides.’

Chalabi’s spokesman in Kuwait, nephew Feisal Chalabi, said Monday that the influence of the INC’s co-founder is already being felt “everywhere.”

“Most of the programs within the civil administration” that the United States is now designing, “most of the ideas and strategies, you can sense a lot of his influence,” he said.

Few Iraqis have worked harder to persuade U.S. governments that Hussein had to go -- and that Washington had to help make that happen.

Chalabi, who once taught mathematics at the American University in Beirut, later headed the Petra Bank in Jordan. In the 1980s, a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement and sentenced him to 22 years in prison. He still is subject to arrest in Jordan, according to senior Jordanian officials.

Chalabi has ties with senior Republicans on Capitol Hill that go back more than a decade. A GOP aide estimated that the Iraqi has met with key Republican senators at least half a dozen times since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when the INC emerged as a coalition of disparate factions melded into one group -- in part to win U.S. support.

“I worked with him for a good five years. He is the only guy I’ve seen that is able to organize the Iraqi opposition and hold them together,” said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He’s bright and tireless and he really works at holding the big principles together. The big focus has been bringing democracy into Iraq and on that he does not alter.”

Chalabi, a British citizen and London resident, works Washington better than many politicians, both allies and critics say. Vice President Dick Cheney is one of his supporters. He’s worked closely with former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing, who served for nine months on the Bush administration National Security Council, to develop political and military plans to topple Hussein.

“A lot of people in his situation might have devoted themselves to their own selfish pursuits,” said Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long advocated support for the INC. “Chalabi could have lived comfortably without spending a day on the effort to liberate Iraq.”

But Chalabi may have stronger backing in the United States than in Iraq.

A recent CIA report on Iraqi sentiments about a post-Hussein government concluded that “overwhelming numbers” of Iraqis were suspicious and skeptical of Chalabi and the INC, according to a U.S. official familiar with the assessment. The report came to the same conclusion about the Iran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has been an on-again, off-again INC ally. They are the two largest exile groups and both have ties with the United States.

In an interview in September, Chalabi dismissed the accusations that his group lacks strong support in Iraq.

“That’s an old mantra,” he said. Until Hussein is toppled, he asserted, it would be difficult for any exile group to prove its popularity.

“It’s hard to demonstrate support in a country with a totalitarian system,” Chalabi said. “Was Stalin beloved of the Russians and Georgians? Was he or not? Was Hitler beloved of the German people? It’s difficult to get people to cross the line between their own personal experiences and their own sense of political support in their own societies and how these symbols and mechanisms can be manipulated by such modern totalitarian methods.”

But even Iraqi allies are highly critical of Chalabi’s political maneuverings.

Kurds who have variously been aligned and nonaligned with the INC are skeptical of Chalabi, and some don’t trust him at all.

Many view him as a carpetbagger who fled Iraq and showed up again on the eve of change, while others stayed and suffered under Hussein.

Many Kurdish officials chafe at what they describe as Chalabi’s towering ego and princely air, but they don’t underestimate him. Many admire his intellect and his political shrewdness. At a recent opposition meeting, one Kurdish official fumed at Chalabi’s perceived arrogance.

“He’s tenacious and articulate,” said a senior Kurdish official. “He’s already promising ministry posts. He’s cultivating the Turks. He’s playing games in Washington. He’s smart, you have to give him this. But the opposition is not liberating Iraq. The U.S. is liberating Iraq.”

Other long-standing INC allies say Chalabi is a good tactician and power broker but accuse him of being a self-absorbed showman who has trouble maintaining relationships vital to long-term political stability.

“At some point people are going to understand that he is like the emperor without any clothes,” said a top INC official who has worked closely with Chalabi for years.

One of the big questions about Chalabi is his Shiite Muslim identity and his talk of purging members of the ruling Baath Party. That is widely interpreted by many Sunni Muslims as removing them from any positions of power. Sunnis, the dominant sect in Islam, have ruled modern Iraq, even though Shiites make up more than half of the population of 24 million.

“This is a huge negative that could provoke trouble,” said a Sunni Muslim leader. “Sunnis control large amounts of business and agriculture and they form a powerful network. If they’re excluded, it will cause real political trouble.”

But allies dismiss Chalabi’s checkered past, contending his trial in absentia in Jordan was a political charade by people out to discredit him. And they say he is either misunderstood or deliberately defamed.

“The disparagement by the State Department and CIA is a disgrace. Every conceivable obstacle has been put in the path of the INC in a systematic and sustained effort to block its development,” said Perle. “What he brings to Iraq is a lifetime of fighting for the liberation of his country.”

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Times staff writers Sam Verhovek in Kuwait City; Jeffrey Fleishman in northern Iraq; Kenneth Silverstein, John Hendren, Maura Reynolds and Nicholas Anderson in Washington; and Sebastian Rotella in Milan, Italy, contributed to this report.