WASHINGTON — An arrest warrant for Ahmad Chalabi is the latest turn in the unlikely saga of a figure who is skilled at winning support from those in power.
For years Washington's favorite Iraqi exile, the 59-year-old financier fell from favor with the Bush administration several months ago as their goals for Iraq collided. Yet he still has supporters among American conservatives, and those who know him say that despite his battles with Iraqi rivals and the Americans, they believe he expects to amass power and wealth in the new Iraq.
Born in Baghdad to an affluent banking family, Chalabi became well known in the United States after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when he helped establish the Iraqi National Congress, an exile organization dedicated to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, Chalabi won the admiration of American lawmakers, neoconservative activists and prominent journalists as he prodded the U.S. government to oust Hussein, rather than try to contain him. His supporters, including top civilians in the administration's Defense Department, called him a patriot with a passion for democracy and the free-market system that they believed could transform Iraq into a keystone in the modernization of a threatening region.
But Chalabi also had strong detractors in the U.S. government and alienated many officials in the CIA and the State Department. Critics often brought up his 1992 conviction for embezzlement, fraud and breach of trust in the collapse of Jordan's Petra Bank, which he founded and ran. The Jordanian government lost several hundred million dollars; Chalabi was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
On April 6, 2003, barely two weeks after the U.S. attack on Iraq began, the Bush administration showed its faith in Chalabi by airlifting him and several hundred armed supporters into Iraq. When the U.S.-led coalition formed an interim government, Chalabi was named to the Iraqi Governing Council, serving for a time as its president.
He also helped to revamp Iraq's financial sector and was made head of the committee supervising "de-Baathification," the purging of members of Hussein's political party from government. In that post, he had enormous influence over who could, and could not, get a job in the state-controlled economy.
