A Dubious Homecoming

When the news hit here that Iraqi National Congress Chairman Ahmad Chalabi had been airlifted by the U.S. into Nasiriyah with a band of Iraqi soldiers April 6, people were puzzled. They did not see a resistance leader heading home after decades of exile: They saw a fugitive.

To much of the world, Chalabi, 58, has been in recent years the most visible face of the Iraqi opposition. Through the INC, which he founded more than a decade ago, he has tirelessly lobbied the U.S. government for regime change in Iraq, even when the issue was a nonstarter. His friends in high places -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon and Congress -- have seen him for years as a possible candidate to lead a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq.

But Jordanians see things differently. “Our problem does not stem from the fact that he is an Iraqi opposition member,” Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said last week in Amman, “but that he is wanted in Jordan and convicted of a criminal offense.”

In 1992, the Jordanian government convicted Chalabi in absentia for embezzlement and fraud and sentenced him to 22 years of hard labor. The charges stem from the demise of the Petra Bank, which Chalabi founded in 1977 and ran until it collapsed in 1989. At its peak, the bank was Jordan’s third-largest, having greatly expanded the country’s use of ATMs and credit cards.

The charges surrounding Chalabi’s conviction are murky. Chalabi has publicly insisted that he was railroaded, that he was the victim of Hussein’s leaning on Jordan to rein him in for his opposition activities. But by Jordan’s accounting, Chalabi diverted millions of dollars of depositors’ assets before his bank collapsed. Consequently, people here “don’t see him for what he stands for politically. They only see him as a bank manager who took the money and ran,” says Hassan Barari, a researcher and specialist in regional politics at the University of Jordan.

The country’s media, which report according to cues from the royal palace, have been largely silent on the Chalabi issue. But in what may be a tacit official acknowledgment that Chalabi could end up as part of a new government next door, news of an amended Economic Crimes Law appeared in the official media Wednesday. Approved by King Abdullah, the law allows prosecutors to cut deals with those convicted of economic crimes, allowing them to pay back “all or part” of stolen funds in exchange for the dismissal of all charges.

That means Chalabi might be welcome again in Jordan if he were to become leader of Iraq. But that is a big if.

Even in the United States, where Chalabi’s strongest support lies -- the U.S. government provided much of the funding for the London-based INC -- he has made enemies. If his supporters in the Defense Department are determined that he has a role to play in Iraq, his detractors, who include officials in the State Department and the CIA, are equally convinced he should not be put forward, calling him egomaniacal and saying he does not have a following in Iraq.

It is certainly true that Chalabi does not have much experience in current-day Iraq. Although his father and grandfather once held high-ranking ministerial posts in the Iraqi government, they were forced to flee during the 1950s, when Chalabi was 13, in the aftermath of a coup d’etat that unseated Iraq’s royal family. He had not returned to the country -- except to the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq -- until this month.

Educated in England and America, with a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago, Chalabi moved back to the Arab world during the 1970s to teach at the American University in Beirut. Eventually, he moved to Jordan, where he founded Petra Bank.

During his years here, Chalabi was a flamboyant presence with many well-placed friends. His management style, says one banker who knew him, was less than democratic. “He was a dictator. Nobody could overrule him,” says the banker. “I don’t think he has democratic blood in him.” For that reason, he says, the bank was run “according to his whims and aspirations,” with little accountability.

Last week, the Guardian newspaper in London reported that it had reviewed documents on the Petra Bank collapse prepared by Arthur Andersen that revealed that the bank’s assets had been overstated by $200 million as a result of bad debts, unsupported foreign currency balances and money owed the bank that was unaccounted for.

The newspaper also reported on the convictions in Switzerland of two of Chalabi’s brothers for false accounting in connection with the collapse of family companies there. About his own legal troubles, Chalabi has said in interviews that the late King Hussein twice offered him a royal pardon but that he refused because he was innocent of any wrongdoing and therefore had no need to be pardoned.

Recently, even Defense Department officials have distanced themselves from Chalabi, saying Iraqis will choose their own leaders and that they have no intention of installing a handpicked ruler. Chalabi didn’t attend an American-sponsored gathering of potential Iraqi leaders last week, sending a representative instead. It’s hard to know whether he stands a chance to lead Iraq. His alleged financial improprieties are hardly disqualifying; as the University of Jordan’s Barari observes: “All our leaders are corrupt.”

The bigger problem may be his American support -- the very thing that has also brought him to prominence. The United States has made itself a target of Arab resentment in part through its support of corrupt despots in the region. “Anybody who comes in with U.S. forces is going to look like a U.S. puppet,” says Robert Baer, an author and former Middle East CIA operative with years of experience in Iraq. Since most Iraqis have never heard of Chalabi, he will be “associated indelibly with the U.S.,” Baer adds. “That’s what Iraqis are going to look at. He’s going to be associated with that chaos.”

If Chalabi is rejected by Iraqis, it would be in part because the U.S. failed to understand how it -- and its handpicked man -- would be perceived. And it’s not the first time that the Americans would have been tone-deaf with regard to what would play well in Iraq. With much of the Arab world convinced that this is a war about oil, and the U.S. insisting that it isn’t, what did the U.S. do upon entering the country? Did it move to protect cultural artifacts and museums and banks?

“One of the first moves in Iraq was securing the oil fields,” a Saudi official notes, reinforcing the perception that “they’re more interested in protecting the fields than Iraqi civilians.”

Does Chalabi have a chance? Iraq is certainly an open question at the moment, and it’s not inconceivable he could be part of the answer. What should he do if he finds himself in power? The practical answer, Baer says, would be to “call up [Afghan Interim President Hamid] Karzai and ask him how he lived this long.”