Ahmed Chalabi, Iraq invasion cheerleader linked to false WMD reports, dead at 71
Ahmed Chalabi, who did more than any other Iraqi to encourage the 2003 US invasion of Baghdad, has died aged 71.
An exile for most of his life, he remained a political exile inside his country for much of the last decade, his public profile and reputation having waned but his capacity to influence affairs in Iraq and beyond less diminished.
He had fought a 20-year campaign to convince the US to move against the Iraqi dictator. As the war approached, Chalabi provided a stream of informants to US officials and journalists in an attempt to convince them that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction – the central plank of the US case for war.
He was instrumental in the passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act, which channelled close to US$100million to opposition groups in the late 1990s, principally his political body, the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
None of the information provided was corroborated, an omission for which Chalabi remained unapologetic while at the same time insisting that he’d been pushing an open door. “We did what we had to do,” he said in 2010. “Saddam is gone and Iraq is a better place. They wanted to go to war anyway.”
Chalabi was championed by senior officials in the Bush administration, mainly from the Pentagon, as a man with secular values who could help democratise Iraq. In early 2004 he was Laura Bush’s guest at her husband’s State of the Union speech. By then the INC was receiving US$350,000 per month from the Defence Intelligence Agency and enjoyed the patronage in Baghdad of the US-run transitional administration, which still had big ideas for him.
That was to change within weeks. In May US soldiers raided his compound in Baghdad over allegations that he had committed fraud. That same month George W. Bush ordered that funding for the INC be stopped, and several weeks later US officials accused Chalabi of leaking state secrets to Iran, including the fact that US intelligence had cracked an essential Iranian communications code.
As Chalabi’s relations with Washington soured, his fortunes also dipped at home. The INC failed to win a seat in the 2005 election and from there it withered as a political force. Chalabi remained unable to muster political support for any senior position in the government. He continued to do better abroad, winning the patronage of Iran, which promptly stepped in to offer funding that the US had stopped.
Although secular, Chalabi identified strongly as a Shia Muslim and with the political aspirations of Iran to be a driving force in regional affairs. Asked in 2012 about his legacy, he responded heartily: “The Shia are rising!” He added: “It is natural to be close to Iran. They are from this region and they have our interests at heart.”
