Oriental Rugs the O'Connell Notes

Notes on Ahmad Chalabi

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IranDidban.com - Mojahedin Revenge on Chalabi

Ahmad Chalabi must work for Mossad not Iran

Report for Congress
Received through the CRS Web
Iraq: U.S. Regime Change Efforts and Post-War Governance
Updated May 9,2003

An Opposition Coalition Emerges

Reports in July 1992 of a serious but unsuccessful coup attempt suggested that the U.S. strategy might ultimately succeed. However, there was disappointment within the George H.W. Bush Administration that the coup had failed and a decision was made to shift the U.S. approach from promotion of a coup to supporting the diverse opposition groups that had led the post-war rebellions. At the same time, the Kurdish, Shiite, and other opposition elements were coalescing into a broad and diverse movement that appeared to be gaining support internationally. This opposition coalition seemed to provide a vehicle for the United States to build a viable overthrow strategy. Congress more than doubled the budget for covert support to the opposition groups to about $40 million for FY1993.

The Iraqi National Congress/Ahmad Chalabi

The growing opposition coalition took concrete shape in an organization called the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was formally constituted when the two main Kurdish militias — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) — participated in a June 1992 meeting in Vienna of dozens of opposition groups. In October 1992, major Shiite Islamist groups came into the coalition when the INC met in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

The INC appeared viable because it brought under one banner varying Iraqi ethnic groups and diverse political ideologies, including nationalists, ex-military officers, and defectors from Iraq’s ruling Baath Party. The Kurds provided the INC with a source of armed force and a presence on Iraqi territory. Its constituent groups publicly united around a platform that appeared to match U.S. values and interests, including human rights, democracy, pluralism, "federalism" (see below), the preservation of Iraq’s territorial integrity, and compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions on Iraq.2 However, many observers doubted its commitment to democracy, because most of its groups have an authoritarian internal structure, and because of inherent tensions among its varied ethnic groups and ideologies.

Ahmad Chalabi.

Selected to chair the INC’s Executive Committee was Ahmad Chalabi, who is about 58 years old, a secular Shiite Muslim from a prominent banking family. He was educated in the United States as a mathematician. He fled Iraq to Jordan in 1958, when the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown in a military coup. This coup occurred 10 years before the Baath Party took power in Iraq (July 1968). In 1978, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan but later ran afoul of Jordanian authorities on charges of financial malfeasance and he left Jordan, possibly with some help from members of Jordan’s royal family, in 1989. The Jordanian government subsequently re-capitalized the bank with national funds. In 1992, he was convicted in absentia of embezzling $70 million from the bank and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Chalabi maintains that the Jordanian government was pressured by Iraq to turn against him, and he asserts that he has since rebuilt ties to the Jordanian government. In April 2003, senior Jordanian officials, including King Abdullah, called Chalabi "divisive" and stopped just short of saying he would be unacceptable to Jordan as leader of Iraq. Chalabi’s critics acknowledge that, despite allegations about his methods, he has been single-minded in his determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and he is said to be the favorite of those Administration officials, particularly in the Department of Defense, that were the most supportive of changing Iraq’s regime by force.

Chalabi does not appear to have a large following inside Iraq, although since his return he appears to be attracting support from those Iraqis that most welcomed the U.S. military offensive against Iraq as liberation from Saddam Hussein’s regime. On April 6, Chalabi and about 700 INC fighters ("Free Iraqi Forces") were airlifted by the U.S. military from their base in the north to the Nasiriya area, purportedly to help stabilize civil affairs in southern Iraq. Chalabi and some Free Iraqi Forces later deployed to Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. Some of the Free Iraqi Forces are believed to be Shiite Muslims who may retain loyalties to various Shiite Islamist groups that may be competing with Chalabi for power in post-war Iraq. Since establishing his headquarters in Baghdad, Chalabi has tried to build support by searching for members of the former regime and arranging for U.S. military forces in Iraq to provide security or other benefits to his potential supporters.

A prominent INC intellectual is Kanaan Makiya, who wrote a 1989 book "Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq," detailing alleged Iraqi regime human rights abuses. Makiya supports a Western-style democracy for Iraq, including full rights for women and Iraq’s minorities. A self-described atheist, he teaches Middle Eastern politics at Brandeis University. Another INC activist, Mohammad al-Zubaidi, declared himself in charge of Baghdad in mid-April, but U.S. officials did not recognize him as mayor and detained him in April 2003.
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/20714.pdf