WASHINGTON — The raid on Ahmad Chalabi's Baghdad home offered proof Thursday of collapsing U.S. support for the former exile once viewed by Bush administration officials as their greatest hope to lead a new Iraq.
Over 15 years, the American-trained financier convinced Washington that he was a sophisticated Shiite Muslim who could Westernize a country in the heart of the Arab world and foster reform throughout the troubled region.
Yet in recent months, Chalabi's support from the Bush administration tumbled as he increasingly challenged U.S. policy to improve his standing with Iraqis.
Though some U.S. officials denied that they were behind the raid, White House officials acknowledged privately that they had known such an action was coming, and they expressed dissatisfaction with their erstwhile ally.
"I don't think anyone in the White House was taken by surprise," one official said. "Chalabi, in terms of people's esteem for him here, has been losing altitude for several months. His actions and past comments have raised serious questions as to what kind of associations we as a government wish to have with him."
Although Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, may still find himself in an important role in Iraq, his split with U.S. authorities invalidated one of the administration's assumptions about the war. They had bet on the wrong man.
Chalabi was one of the primary advocates for the war, and he was well positioned to argue the case as head of an umbrella exile group called the Iraqi National Congress, which he helped organize in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Chalabi, whose father once headed the Iraqi Senate, was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fled to Jordan with his family after a coup in Baghdad in 1958.
As head of the INC during the 1990s, he cultivated the support of influential members of Congress and leading neoconservatives. The most dramatic sign of U.S. confidence in Chalabi came on April 6, 2003, when U.S. forces airlifted him and about 500 INC fighters from northern Iraq to the southern city of Nasiriya, to help stabilize the country as American forces prepared to seize Baghdad.
As recently as March, one U.S. official marveled at Chalabi's skills in making the Americans think he was their most important contact with the Iraqis, and making the Iraqis think they needed him to get what they wanted from the Americans.
