I met Chalabi in Beirut in 1972 in the early stages of his long campaign to bring down Saddam Hussein. Going it alone and engendering controversy are nothing new for this U.S.-educated math professor, whose Amman bank was confiscated by Jordanian authorities in 1989 amid allegations of corruption.
Those allegations did not prevent the Clinton administration from approving CIA funding of Chalabi's INC organization for nearly four years in the 1990s. Only in 1997, when he went public in an interview with me about the CIA's expensive, ambivalent and failed covert efforts to overthrow the Iraqi dictator, did Chalabi become a target of agency ire, defamatory leaks and worse.
More recently Chalabi added White House staffers and occupation chief Paul Bremer to the long list of those he has offended and challenged with his domineering manner, prickly sense of nationalism and unshakable self-confidence. By coming out in open, bitter opposition to the latest U.S. transition plan and its rehabilitation of senior Baathists, Chalabi seems to have crossed a final red line.
It's obviously a supportive piece.
I don't think that Chalabi has ever had as much influence on US policy in Iraq as he wanted. Receall that he wanted to be [link|http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Ahmed_Chalabi|put in charge of a provisional government as soon as the invasion started] (a good link, but I personally would take some of the spin there with a grain of salt). I think that would have been a disaster ("US Puppet Installed in Baghdad!") The US never moved fast enough for him. It's not as if he was the golden child and just suddenly moved into the dog house. He seems to have always had his own agenda that didn't match the US's in many respects.
I'm sure Chalabi had strong supporters in the US, some in high places, but I don't think that on the whole he was the US's man in Iraq. Reports of the INC trying to blackmail people on contracts sound plausible to me; reports of Chalabi being an Iranian agent sound far-fetched to me at this point. We'll see if more evidence appears.
It'll also be interesting to see if the INC's charges against the UN Oil for Food program have any substance in Volker's report.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.