Note- It’s hard to keep track of ther players without a score card… Here are my Cliffs Notes…
Ahmed Chalabi is the Iraqi-American who Team Bush relied on heavily for WMD intelligence, which later turned out to be completely false. Chalabi has been hanging around Washington DC for years, trying to convince the US to overthrow Saddam, and he has his own lobbyists and PR firms working for him. Chalabi is also a convicted felon wanted in Jordan for bank fraud. Team Clinton knew Chalabi was a con man and ignored him, but people in Bush’s Defense Dept embraced him, even though the State Dept (Colin Powell etc) warned them that Chalabi was a con man and couldn’t be trusted. Up until a month ago or so, the Bush White House was funding Chalabi to the tune of 300,000 dollars of taxpayer money per MONTH, until US troops broke down Chalabi’s door in Iraq recently, on suspiscion that Chalabi is actually a foriegn agent working for IRAN.
Now as various forces jockey for power in Iraq after the US handover, it looks like Chalabi is forming an alliance with Moqtada Al-Sadr, the Shi’ite cleric whose supporters US troops battled with over Fallujah, and who currently has seized control over four other Iraqi cities and is fighting against US troops.
Think there will be “democracy” in Iraq with a Chalabi/Al-Sadr coalition in power? Is this how we’ll “liberate” Iraq?
Chalabi’s new role: Coalition builder
Dumped by U.S.,the former Iraqi exile tries to recruit anti-American cleric as political partner.
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Los Angeles Times
Published on: 07/29/04
BAGHDAD, Iraq -
Ahmed Chalabi is a survivor. Snubbed by the Bush administration neoconservatives who once embraced him, the Iraqi patrician turned populist is building a grass-roots coalition of Shiite Muslim groups.
“The Americans kicked him out the front door, but he is climbing back in through the window,” said Jabber Habib, a professor at Baghdad University who closely tracks Shiite politics.
Ahmed Chalabi says his Shiite Political Council represents foes of Saddam Hussein ‘who were .?.?. left out of the new government.’
Among those Chalabi is reaching out to is prominent anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Political analysts here believe Chalabi’s new approach eventually will win support from a significant segment of al-Sadr’s followers if he chooses to run for office in the Iraqi elections scheduled for January.
That would give Chalabi and his new organization, the Shiite Political Council, mass support that could yield real clout in the majority Shiite community.
More established Shiite parties alternately discount Chalabi and describe him as a challenging opponent. He is gathering up the political scraps, “mingling with little groups” in the words of Ridha Taqi, director of political relations for one of the two major Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
But he acknowledged that if Chalabi can bring al-Sadr on board, he will be a formidable force.
“If the Sadr movement abandons violence and makes an alliance with Ahmad Chalabi, he will gain something from that movement,” Taqi said.
Chalabi’s organization has bypassed the Supreme Council and the Dawa Party, which have members in key posts in the interim government. Chalabi said the group is instead reaching out to the masses who feel they lack representation.
The Shiite Political Council “are the people who were in Iraq fighting the old government but were left out of the new government,” Chalabi said in an interview in his home. “This will bring into the political mainstream most of the dispossessed Shia groups and those who have been neglected in the past year after [Saddam Hussein’s] overthrow.”
Chalabi’s metamorphosis from the Pentagon’s all-but-anointed choice for president of Iraq to an outspoken critic of U.S. policy and a Shiite leader began several months ago, when it became apparent that he was unlikely to be offered a major role in the government.
He distanced himself from the United States and began to voice the widely shared frustration with the Coalition Provisional Authority and, particularly, civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer.
Chalabi’s transformation was all the more striking because he had been a persistent lobbyist for the invasion of Iraq. But with U.S. officials raising stark questions about flawed intelligence on Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction and subsequent allegations that Chalabi leaked American secrets to Iran, the former exile denied the accusations and began to draw himself as a victim of a U.S. campaign to destroy him.
Shunned by his chief foreign sponsor, Chalabi was free to remake himself. As part of that effort, he reached out publicly to al-Sadr.
Now, Chalabi is steadily building his new coalition. The leadership of the Shiite Political Council includes several members of the former Iraqi Governing Council who, like Chalabi, were left out of the interim government. But the bulk of the members come from small, little-known groups. They are joining because they see the organization as a means to make their voices heard.
The hope of the Shiite parties is that in the elections, Iraq will be considered a single electoral district.
Coalitions would offer slates of candidates who would join the transitional national assembly in proportion to the votes won by each slate.
Chalabi’s approach may have considerable appeal. Many Iraqis take a dim view of political parties – a legacy of the Saddam era, when a single, often abusive party ran all politics.
There is limited enthusiasm for established political organizations. By putting together a group that styles itself as a coalition, Chalabi may have it both ways: an organization with the reach of a party without the taint that tends to attach to established groups.