Ahmed Chalabi
Iraqi National Congress: Former head
Iraqi Governing Council is a Member of
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: Associate!
May 1, 2004

Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), leading member of the Iraqi Governing Council, and the poster boy of neoconservative policy wonks, is a Shiite Muslim who was born to a wealthy banking family in Iraq. At the age of 12, his family left Iraq. Although Chalabi has spent most of his life in the West, he has remained closely involved in Middle East affairs. But his activities, as well as his close association with the Bush administration, have made him an extremely unpopular figure in the region.

In the mid-1990s, his INC tried to organize an uprising in Kurdish areas of Iraq. When the effort failed and hundreds of supporters were killed, Chalabi and many of his INC cohorts fled the country. Earlier, in 1992, after his Petra Bank folded, Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a Jordanian court for bank fraud. Chalabi has repeatedly insisted that he is innocent and says the bank’s failure was orchestrated by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. (1), (2), (4)

According to a Washington Post article, the Pentagon’s faith in Chalabi as a potential Iraqi leader, despite his 45-year absence from the country, caused war planners to ignore State Department warnings about the lack of support for Chalabi in the country and overlook the emergence of a radical, fundamentalist Shiite political base in the country. Said one unnamed official: “They really did believe he is a Shiite leader. ... They thought, ‘We’re set, we’ve got a Shiite -- check the box here.’” Walter P. Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency specialist in Middle East affairs, told the newspaper, “We’re flying blind on this. It’s a classic case of politics and intelligence. In this case, the political community have (sic) absolutely whipped the intel community, or denigrated it so much.” (3)

Regarding Chalabi’s supporters in Washington, journalist Robert Dreyfus wrote: “Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey. The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).” (2)