Iraqi who helped pave way for US invasion

Ahmed Chalabi, who has died aged 71, was an Iraqi politician who helped persuade the United States to invade Iraq in 2003 and then unsuccessfully tried to attain power as his country was torn apart by sectarian violence.

A mathematician with a PhD. from the University of Chicago, Chalabi, who came from a prominent Shia family, cultivated close ties with journalists in Washington and London, US politicians and the neoconservative advisers who helped shape President George W Bush’s foreign policy. -

Chalabi’s relationship with the Americans stretched back decades. In 1998, he helped persuade Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, which was signed by President Clinton and which declared it the policy of the United States to replace Saddam Hussein’s government with a democratic one.

His group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), would get more than $100 million from the CIA and other agencies between its founding in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated friendships with a circle of hawkish Republican, including Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, who were central to the United States' march to war.

Chalabi’s contention, broadly shared by US intelligence agencies, was that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. But most of the case for war was predicated on flawed intelligence.

A 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that “false information” from sources affiliated with Chalabi’s group was used to support key intelligence community assessments.

‘False information’

It found that the group “attempted to influence US policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists”.

Probably the most notorious defector was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, code-named Curveball, the brother of a Chalabi aide. His false account of mobile bioweapons laboratories was cited by secretary of state Colin Powell at the United Nations. The Senate report found an “insufficient basis” to determine whether Curveball had provided his information at the behest of the Iraqi National Congress.

As it became clear that Iraq did not have an active chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programme and as the occupying US forces did not receive the welcome that the Iraqi opposition had predicted, the Bush administration distanced itself from Chalabi.

Under prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, he led a committee that essentially ejected Sunnis from positions of authority. That helped set the stage for a new Sunni insurgency, which some experts say metastasised into the Islamic State, the militant group that now controls a large portion of territory in Iraq and Syria.

As recently as last year, Chalabi’s name was floated as a candidate for prime minister, and at his death he was the head of the finance committee in parliament. On hearing of his death, Iraqi leaders emphasised his role in ousting Saddam, who was captured in 2003 and executed in 2006. Prime minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement, “He dedicated his life to opposing the dictatorial regime, and he played a great role in building a democratic process in Iraq.”

Ahmed Abdul Hadi Chalabi was born in Baghdad in 1944. His family was part of a tiny secular Shia elite that had prospered under the Turks and then, after the first World War, the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British.

Jesuit education

He attended an elite Jesuit high school, Baghdad College, where his schoolmates included fellow Shias like Ayad Allawi, who would later become a relative by marriage and serve as an acting prime minister, and Adel Abdul Mahdi, who would later become a finance minister, a vice-president and, now, Iraq’s oil minister.

In 1958, the same year that army officers overthrew King Faisal II, the Chalabi family went into exile. Chalabi studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago, in 1969. He later taught at the American University of Beirut and published several mathematical papers.

During his time overseas, the Baath Party staged a coup, in 1968, and by 1979, Saddam had managed to consolidate power. The disastrous Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the subsequent US-led war that ousted his forces from Kuwait galvanised Iraqi exiles. In 1992, Chalabi and others founded the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based umbrella coalition.

After the overthrow of Saddam the Americans named him to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council. But images of toppled statues and cheering Iraqis quickly gave way to scenes of violent resistance to the occupiers. Within a year of the war, the Americans dropped Chalabi and soon stopped funding the INC.

Chalabi, for his part, attributed the problems in Iraq to the Americans for staying too long and for failing to immediately turn over power to Iraqis, even though most observers doubted that exiles like Chalabi, who had been away for 45 years, could have kept the country together on their own.