The coalition’s raid last week on the Baghdad home of Ahmed Chalabi and the seizure of files and computers mark a curious development in the unfolding tragedy of the US occupation of Iraq. Chalabi, a prominent former Iraqi exile convicted in absentia of fraud and sentenced to 20 years in jail in Jordan, was once Washington’s blue-eyed boy. It was his organization, the Iraqi National Congress, which is alleged to have fed the CIA much of the information on which their phony allegations about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was based. Coupled with the abrupt cut of $330,000 a month in funding for Chalabi’s organization, it would seem that the Bush White House is out to settle accounts with a man who has let it down — worse, who makes it look a dupe.
Following the raid on Chalabi’s home, the Iraqi Governing Council issued a strong protest. It cut no ice with the Council that the US raiders were accompanied by Iraqi police and that there were suggestions that Chalabi may be guilty of more than misleading US intelligence but also of kidnapping and misusing Iraqi funds. The Council saw this as an attack on itself. Coming as the raid did shortly after the bomb attack on another of their number, Abdul-Jabbar Youssef Al-Sheikhli, and the assassination of its head Izzedin Salim the week before, the Council was in a jumpy mood.
Chalabi, like most of the returned former exiles the US drafted into the Council, is regarded with considerable suspicion by most Iraqis. Until the Americans turned on him, he was widely viewed as a Washington stooge and his opponents pointed to his shady bank dealings in Jordan. That he has now become a target for US action could possibly change this view.
Chalabi has already come out with words of condemnation of the raid, in language that more closely resembles the sentiments with which his enemies greeted the US invasion. “I am now calling for policies that liberate the Iraqi people, to achieve full sovereignty now,” he said, “and they don’t like that.”
But the question is who duped whom. Was Washington really fooled by Chalabi’s claims, or was he being used as a patsy whom the US was always planning to hang out to dry when it became clear that the weapons of mass destruction never existed and that no Iraqi other than Chalabi himself was going to welcome the US with flowers?
Has Chalabi, in other words, outlived his usefulness? Or is the US, by distancing itself from him, attempting to help him gain credibility with his own people? These questions are being asked, and if they seem paranoid, if they sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories, it is only because Chalabi is such a murky character that he taints everything he comes into contact with, not least his erstwhile masters in Washington.
