Ahmed Chalabi, the man behind the US invasion of Iraq, dies!

Cairo: Ahmed Chalabi, who died in Baghdad on Tuesday aged 71,was a key mover behind the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

His Iraqi National Congress, a group of exiles opposed to the rule of Saddam Hussein, built up strong links with right-wing US foreign policy hawks in Washington and found its opening in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Chalabi fed the US administration of George W Bush information about supposed weapons of mass destruction, helping provide the president’s team with his main justification for removing Saddam — but the weapons turned out not to exist.

Undaunted, the politician and former banker sought a role in the new Iraq, and was among the architects of the purge of members of Saddam’s ruling Baath party.

That has been widely seen as planting the seeds of anger among the country’s minority which would give rise to a still continuing insurgency.

Chalabi was less successful in his attempts to win leadership positions in post-Saddam Iraq.

Dogged by his ties to the US government and his involvement in a bank scandal in neighbouring Jordan, he also lacked the support base of politicians in long-standing Iran-backed parties.

Ahmed Chalabi’s wealthy family was active in Iraqi politics before a 1958 revolution toppled the monarchy.
Chalabi himself spent most of his life in exile and was disconnected from large parts of his own society, studying mathematics at the University of Chicago and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1977 he founded Petra Bank, which grew to be one of Jordan’s main financial institutions.

The bank collapsed in 1990, and two years later a military court sentenced him in absentia to 22 years imprisonment for fraud. He maintained that the charges were politically motivated.

At around the same time, he began to receive backing from the CIA,the US spy agency, and emerged as a leader of the Iraqi National Congress, according to a lengthy profile published in New Yorker magazine in 2004.

In the mid-1990s he organised a failed uprising from bases in Kurdish northern Iraq, as the government in Baghdad looked weak in the wake of the first Gulf War.

Chalabi then developed close links with leading right-wing US politicians and foreign policy experts who were eager to see Saddam toppled. According to New Yorker, his group received more than 100 million dollars in US government funding between 1992 and 2004.
— dpa