For Iraq, Potential Leader With a Tarnished Past
Moqtada al-Sadr and Chalabi
By ROD NORDLANDJUNE 30, 2014
BAGHDAD —
He took millions of dollars from the C.I.A.,
founded and was accused of defrauding the second-biggest bank in Jordan
and sold the Bush administration a bill of goods on weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
At first championed by the Bush administration’s neoconservatives as a potential leader of Iraq,
Ahmad Chalabi
ended up persona non grata, effectively barred from the wartime
American Embassy here. Now, in an improbable twist of fate, Mr. Chalabi
is being talked about as a serious candidate for prime minister. He has
also been back to the embassy.
With Sunni insurgents rampaging across the country and sectarian
killings on the rise, everything old seems new again in Iraq —
including, apparently, Mr. Chalabi.
And on Monday, Obama administration officials said that about 200
more troops had been sent to protect the American Embassy in Baghdad and
the Baghdad airport. The additional troops, who arrived on Sunday, will
operate helicopters and drones to “bolster airfield and route
security,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a
statement.
Iraqi politicians have begun to position themselves as possible
replacements for the embattled Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
These are the four contenders.
In addition to those forces, another 100 troops who the Pentagon had
previously said would be sent to Iraq are headed to Baghdad to help with
security and logistics. The moves will raise the total number of
American troops deployed to Iraq for security and advisory missions to
about 750.
As Iraq’s political parties held round-the-clock meetings the past
three days to try to agree on the shape of a new government in time to
convene Parliament on Tuesday and begin choosing new leaders, Mr.
Chalabi’s name was one of two being prominently mentioned to replace the
incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
Mr. Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has only one seat in the
Parliament, his own, and it is a measure of his skills as a political
operator that he is even under consideration.
It is also a measure of the desperate state of the effort to forge a
new government amid severe sectarian strains and demands from both
American and Iranian allies that Sunnis and Kurds be included — all
while the country is under severe threat from Sunni-based Islamic
extremists.
“Our candidates for prime minister are Adel Abdul Mahdi or Ahmad Chalabi,” said Hakim al-Zamili,
a prominent leader in the parliamentary bloc of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, which in turn is part of the National Alliance, a coalition of all Shiite groups.
The alliance is trying to persuade the State of Law party of Mr.
Maliki, also a Shiite, to stand aside for another Shiite. “If State of
Law refuses to accept any other candidate, we will ally with the Kurds
and the Sunnis to form a government,” said Mr. Zamili, who was accused
of organizing death squads when he served as Iraq’s deputy health
minister.
“You know, there is a saying in Arabic that when you have seen death,
you don’t mind a high fever,” said one aide to Mr. Maliki who is among a
growing number of Mr. Maliki’s own supporters hoping that he will bow
out. The aide’s point was that almost anything was possible in the
contorted state of Iraqi politics.
The normally garrulous Mr. Chalabi did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
On the face of it, Mr. Chalabi as prime minister seems, at best,
highly unlikely. His exile-based, C.I.A.-financed Iraqi National
Congress never built much of a grass-roots following in Iraq, and he
suffered from the Americans’ growing unpopularity as the war dragged on.
His role in promoting what many now view as concocted evidence of
weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein badly tarnished him.
Only a year after the invasion, American special forces raided his
home in the upper class Mansour neighborhood, apparently in a vain
attempt to prove him a spy for Iran. Unlike many returning exiles, Mr.
Chalabi stayed in Iraq through all the bad years, and not without risk;
one suicide bomber narrowly missed him, killing six of his bodyguards.
Spurned by the Americans, he became an ally of Mr. Sadr, the radical
Shiite leader, a friend to Iran and a regular visitor to the Shiite
ayatollahs in Najaf.
Mr. Chalabi, 69, put skills honed during long years of exile in
Washington as a communicator and back-room operator to good use, though,
forging alliances with the Sadrists and their Iranian patrons, and also with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiites’ supreme religious leader.
Some argue that Mr. Chalabi is at best a long-shot candidate, but so
is every Maliki opponent at this point. Mr. Maliki’s State of Law party
gained the biggest number of seats in the April 30 election, and now
claims 95, well short of the 165 needed to make a majority in the
328-seat Parliament. But Mr. Maliki has lost support from the powerful
Shiite clerics who, like the Americans, have politely but clearly
signaled they would prefer he step down.
Replacing Mr. Maliki is one of the few things nearly all other
politicians agree on — the other Shiite parties, as well as the Sunnis
and Kurds and a host of tiny parties, which together could theoretically
control as many as 233 seats in the Parliament.
Mr. Maliki’s State of Law supporters say the arithmetic is all on the
incumbent’s side, however, and scoff at suggestions any other candidate
could replace him. “Even if other parties don’t attend the first
session, the State of Law with other small parties joining it will have
enough seats to form a government,” said a party leader, Alia Nussif.
Nevertheless, at least four State of Law political leaders have said
they want to see Mr. Maliki leave for someone whom all Shiites could
coalesce around and other groups would find acceptable. That could
either be some other figure in his party or, more likely, someone from
one of the other major Shiite parties, most likely the Islamic Supreme
Council of Iraq.
That is where Mr. Chalabi’s chance comes into play. In the recent
elections, he ran as an independent with the Islamic Supreme Council
alliance, whose leading candidate was Bayan Jabr. Mr. Jabr, however, was
the interior minister during some of the worst days of sectarian
violence, when police and security forces were deeply implicated in the
killings of Sunnis.
Mr. Chalabi, a secular Shiite, would not have that problem, although
he was in charge of the de-Baathification commission that stripped Sunni
officials of their positions. Lately, he has called for
de-Baathification to be ended in the interest of healing differences
between sects.
Mr. Chalabi also
has the support of the followers of Mr. Sadr, whose Mahdi Army battled
the Americans in the streets until he made peace and joined the
political process. Mr. Sadr’s allies control 34 seats in the new
Parliament, even more than the Islamic Supreme Council, once the biggest
Shiite party, with 29.
The other candidate some of the Sadrists are talking about is Adel
Abdul Mahdi, a former vice president and stalwart of the Islamic Supreme
Council. Mr. Abdul Mahdi is tarnished by the years that he spent in
government, however, and reputedly does not enjoy the level of Iranian
support that Mr. Chalabi and the
Sadrists have.
“Ahmad Chalabi is close to all the parties and is a good candidate,”
said Nahida al-Daini, a leader with the Sunni Mutahidoon party. “But
accepting him will also depend on internal and external approvals.” She
apparently was referring to Iraqi religious leaders and foreign
countries like Iran. Mr. Abdul Mahdi was also a possibility, she said.
Ahmed al-Sharifi, president of an Iraqi think tank called the Center
for Strategic Studies, based in Karbala, in southern Iraq, said Mr.
Chalabi was the most likely candidate to emerge as prime minister, at
least in part because his lack of a political organization puts him in
the role of an independent, and because he also enjoys support from the
powerful marja, as the council of ayatollahs in Iraq, led by Mr.
Sistani, is called.
“He’s a technocrat, an independent within the Shiite alliance, and
he’s a man everybody can agree on among Sunnis and Kurds,” Mr. Sharifi
said. Even his old C.I.A. connections are no longer a liability, he
said. “Nobody cares about that stuff anymore.”
