Post-War Iraq: Chalabi

[andyfox]

U.S. educated banker and convicted felon Ahmad Chalabi was airlifted into Iraq on Sunday by the U.S. military. He is to be our No Dinh Diem in Iraq.

Chalabi fled Iraq in the 1950s as a youth. He attended MIT and the University of CHicago. He has a home in Washington D.C. Dick Cheney is one of his biggest supporters, as is Richard Perle.

Chalabi was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan in the 1980s.
He has close ties with senior Republicans on Capitol Hill.

A recent CIA report, however, say that "overwhelming numbers" of Iraqis are suspicious and skeptical of Chalabi. Many view him as a carpetbagger who fled Iraq and showed up again on the eve of change, while others stayed and suffered under Hussein.

Any of this sound familiar?

[Cyrus]

"Chalabi attended MIT and the University of Chicago. He has a home in Washington D.C. He was convicted of bank fraud in Jordan in the 1980s."

Sounds like the perfect choice for Iraqi Vice President.

"He has close ties with senior Republicans on Capitol Hill. Dick Cheney is one of his biggest supporters, as is Richard Perle."

Now, there's stating the obvious for ya.

[Jimbo]

here is the rest of the story:

"As a young man Chalabi lived in Jordan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom and the United States, where he attended MIT before earning a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He took a position teaching math at the American University of Beirut. In 1977, Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan invited Chalabi to Amman to establish the Petra Bank, a financial institution that would soon become the second-largest commercial bank in Jordan.

In an August 1989 episode still surrounded by controversy, however, the government of Jordan seized the Petra Bank under martial law, arresting its chief currency trader and using Jordan's central bank to pump $164 million into the Petra Bank and its allied institutions to keep them liquid. To avoid arrest, Chalabi fled the country "under mysterious circumstances," according to a 1989 article in the Financial Times. The Hudson Institute's Max Singer says that Prince Hassan personally drove Chalabi to the Jordanian border, helping him escape. (According to one account, Chalabi was in the trunk of the car.) Chalabi eventually was tried in absentia by a Jordanian court and sentenced to 22 years of hard labor for embezzlement, fraud and currency-trading irregularities. He reportedly got away with more than $70 million.

The INC offers a different version. According to Zaab Sethna, an INC spokesman, King Hussein of Jordan executed a politically motivated coup against Chalabi in coordination with Iraq because Chalabi was "using the bank to fund [Iraqi] opposition groups and learning a lot about illegal arms transfers to Saddam." Because the Petra Bank had inside information about Jordanian-Iraqi trade, Chalabi used his position in a freelance, cloak-and-dagger operation to feed intelligence about Iraq's trade deals to the CIA. Because Chalabi was already active in anti-Iraq opposition groups and had a connection with Perle, it's possible that Chalabi's account is true.

Further evidence of political motives behind the seizure of the Petra Bank and Chalabi's intelligence connections: The American lawyer who represented the Petra Bank's Washington, D.C., subsidiary was former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. And when Chalabi fled the country, anonymous leaflets reportedly circulated linking Chalabi to an alliance with Iraq's Shi'a and with (mostly Shi'a) Iran, all in a vague conspiracy against Iraq and Jordan. (During the Iran-Iraq war and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Jordan -- always delicately balanced between "Iraq and a hard place," as King Hussein was wont to say -- tilted toward Iraq. Afterward, King Hussein distanced himself from Baghdad and eventually reconciled with Chalabi. The jail sentence for bank fraud stands but reportedly might be lifted soon by Jordan's King Abdullah.)

Of course, the fact that Chalabi may have been prosecuted for political reasons does not mean that he is innocent of embezzlement and fraud. In any case, allegations of self-dealing have followed him everywhere since."

[MMMMMM]

You know, nicky, all this confusion about the new Iraqi government could easily be avoided if we would simply make them the 51st state.

Once they started receiving welfare, food stamps and all the other benefits of statehood I'll bet they'd be saying "USA! USA! USA!" before and after evening prayers.

[Ray Zee]

i have seen the bush administration put all its cronies into power in this country and gut all the environmental laws we achieved the last 20 years for the benefit of big business. so i would expect him to do the same thing in iraq, but modified a little because of world pressure.

[MMMMMM]

My only two major two criticisms of the Bush administration are: the gutting of environmental laws, and the erosion of our civil liberties.

Noteworthy however that our civil liberties have been steadily eroding for a long while, well before the Bush administration.

[andyfox]

Good post, Jimbo. Many years ago, we brought Ngo Dinh Diem back to Vietnam to "run" the "government" of South Vietnam. I put "run" in quotation marks because he had no idea what to do when first put into place and CIA operative Edward Lansdale met with him daily to tell him how to do things. I also put "government" in quotation marks because the country was a fictitious entity, run by the United States.

The Chalabi situation sounds like the same kind of deal.

[nicky g]

"You know, nicky"

Eh? I've been off tormenting other posters.

[Jimbo]

Andy I have similar apprehensions as you regarding Chalabi's ability to govern Iraq. However comaparing Iraq to Vietnam takes a stretch of the imagination which I am unable to muster. After all we do agree we lost the war in Vietnam, so far the result in Iraq appears to be different. That implies the aftermath will also differ greatly.

[Ray Zee]

m,

but those two things are the ones that are hardest to get back and for me anyway the most important things there are.

[MMMMMM]

That's a very good point.

I think we have to prosecute the war on terror and prevent proliferation of WMD, or we are going to wake up one day with the greatest environmental disaster of all: several major cities nuked to a crisp. I don't see why we should have to gut environmental protection or lose our civil rights to do it, though.

This is why I sometimes see little to choose between candidates. We need very strong defense and, now, it seems, offense against terrorists and their supporters. I think Republicans are better for that, generally speaking. However we also need focus on the environment and civil liberties: Democrats are generally better for that.

Our civil liberties have been disappearing fairly steadily for some time, regardless of who which party exerted more control (at least I think this is the case). Unconstitutional seizure laws, etc. are really wrong IMO. The "war on drugs" provided the means to get such legislations through. Now the "war on terror" provides the backdrop for passage of further erosions of rights.

I'm not sure what to do about it, but it's worth thinking about. Maybe Petitions Online has some petitions regarding such things, or maybe there is an expedient way for people to email our congressmen in support of our concerns.

[andyfox]

Diem was installed before we invaded Vietnam.

The simlarities I see is that someone who has not been in the country for a while, who has been westernized, is being brought in as our chosen man in a country we don't understand because he sees things our way.