By Michael Georgy
Reuters, 14 December 2005
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Ahmad Chalabi has been called many things, few of them flattering: a crook, a Pentagon stooge and a trickster who fooled Americans into invading Iraq with false intelligence and then sold U.S. secrets to Iran.
The urbane and wealthy banker rejects all those barbs, none of which has deterred him from pursuing his political ambitions via a convoluted course worthy of his mathematician's training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Chicago.
Even Chalabi's toughest critics praise him as a master dealmaker who has survived and thrived in treacherous postwar politics despite ranking -- in admittedly unreliable opinion polls -- as one of Iraq's least-liked leaders.
His latest alliances could land him another senior post in the next government after serving in the last one as deputy prime minister and head of a committee steering oil policy.
Last year he survived an assassination attempt and escaped a U.S.-appointed judge's warrant for his arrest on charges of counterfeiting money. The charges were later dropped.
Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in 1992 by a military court in Jordan, where he had founded a bank that failed. He says the charges were politically motivated.
A longtime CIA-funded foe of Saddam Hussein, he returned to Iraq under U.S. escort after the 2003 invasion and spearheaded efforts to remove senior Baathists from public office.
Many Americans saw him as Iraq's next leader, but after four decades in exile, the secular politician from Baghdad's Shi'ite merchant class was seen by many Iraqis as a tool of Washington.
Chalabi also fell out with his American allies as U.S. forces became targets for Iraqi insurgents and failed to find Saddam's unconventional arsenal cited to justify the war.
The man who in exile was the best-connected Iraqi politician in Washington became a vocal critic of U.S. policy in Iraq.
Last year American soldiers helped Iraqi troops raid Chalabi's compound in Baghdad. Charges surfaced in Washington that he had fed U.S. secrets to Tehran. Chalabi denied it.
Since then he has bounced back, working hard to forge ties with top Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and with Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shi'ite religious militia leader.
He was returning from a trip to Najaf, where Sistani lives, when gunmen fired on his convoy, killing two of his guards.
Before the war, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress directed defectors to the U.S. government to provide what proved to be unreliable intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
Chalabi shrugged off accusations he had sought to trick the United States into invading Iraq, saying recently: "It's always more important to look to the future than to the past."
He has even sought to rebuild bridges with the Americans, meeting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington last month, just after he had visited Tehran.
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Citation: Michael Georgy. "Crafty Chalabi still player in Iraq politics," Reuters, 14 December 2005.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-14T114948Z_01_HO442503_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true&src=cms
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