The Real Winner in Iraq

Once upon a time, there was an Iraqi exile who dreamed of returning home.

In London and Washington, he carefully cultivated the friendship of powerful men who knew little about his homeland, and made sure that their picture of Iraq came from him and his sources. He befriended a reporter for a major New York paper, and feed her stories that served his interests. And if his stories and his sources weren't, strictly speaking, true, well, what is truth?

Was he a cynical man manipulating others for his own aggrandizement? Was he a true patriot, working for the good of his country from exile? Who can say?

From his deputy premier's seat in the elected Iraqi government, Chalabi, 60, oversees Iraq's vast oil resources as chairman of the energy council. He presides over a board that regulates multimillion-dollar rebuilding contracts. He commands the controversial purge of former Baath Party members from government posts and the Iraqi Special Tribunal prosecuting Saddam Hussein. Until an oil minister was named, Chalabi held that job, too.

One of his top aides, Entifadh Qanbar, is headed for a plum job at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington. Chalabi's Harvard-educated nephew is the finance minister; rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al Sadr is an ally. On a visit to a hospital in southern Iraq, the secular Chalabi was introduced as "the pride of the Shiites," suggesting that at least some members of the majority sect now claim him as their own.

"Chalabi is a clever politician who knows how to get ahead," said Sheik Khalaf al Alayan of the Iraqi National Dialogue Committee, an umbrella group for Sunni factions. "In any place related to money, you can be sure to find Chalabi's people in control."

What's that you say? Chalabi?! Wasn't he discredited for passing false intelligence to us, and for possibly being an Iranian spy? It it the same guy? Why, yes. Yes it is.

A comeback of Chalabi's magnitude is hard work, and he started from rock bottom. He'd become an easy scapegoat for the now-unpopular invasion of Iraq after peddling false or exaggerated intelligence to the Bush administration to fulfill his lifelong dream of Saddam's ouster. His pagoda-style villa in Baghdad was ransacked during a probe into allegations of counterfeiting and kidnapping, and American officials accused him of passing secrets to
Iran. The Jordanian government asked for his extradition on a 1992 embezzlement conviction.

Abruptly spurned by his hawkish friends in Washington and faced with little street support in Baghdad, Chalabi's star dimmed. Then came a total makeover. He turned critical of the Americans, who a year earlier had airlifted him into Iraq, and relied on Iraqi power brokers to protect his shaky Baghdad empire.

He helped build the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition that swept the January elections and installed him as one of three deputy premiers to Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari. An Iraqi court threw out the charges that led to the raid of Chalabi's home, and the judge who signed the search warrant was demoted and fired.

Chalabi has cemented his longstanding relationship with Iraq's Kurdish minority in the north and has reached out to Iraq's disaffected Sunni Arabs, who accuse him of overzealous persecution of the mostly Sunni members of Saddam's former Baath Party. Still, even militant Sunni clerics such as Hareth al Dhari of the Muslim Scholars Association receive their nemesis, albeit with a challenge summed up as: You brought the Americans, you get them out.

"After America saw the real Chalabi and abandoned him, he turned to the tribal and religious movements," said Hazem Ali, a political analyst at Baghdad University. "It's campaign season for the elections. He's going to do whatever he can to get votes."

Even the U.S. government has warmed to Chalabi again. American officials never pursued the allegation that his associates passed intelligence to Iran, and both U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Chalabi to congratulate him on his election win. He accepted the U.S. military's offer to train his phalanx of bodyguards. And he attended the American Embassy's Fourth of July celebration, where diplomats and U.S. military commanders greeted him like an old friend.

Isn't it so nice when a hometown boy finally makes good?