2003 жылғы Ирак премьер-министрі Әхмед Шалби

Prime minister of Iraq in 2003

Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi (أحمد عبد الهادي الجلبي; 30 October 1945 – 3 November 2015) was an Iraqi politician, dissident, a founder of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) who served as the President of the Governing Council of Iraq (37th Prime Minister of Iraq) and a Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Ibrahim al Jaafari. He was interim Minister of Oil in Iraq in April–May 2005 and December 2005 – January 2006 and Deputy Prime Minister from May 2005 to May 2006. Chalabi failed to win a seat in parliament in the December 2005 elections, and when the new Iraqi cabinet was announced in May 2006, he was not given a post. Once dubbed the "George Washington of Iraq" by American supporters, he was initially a CIA backed operative, who later fell out of favor, with US Special Forces raiding his private residence in Baghdad only one year after the invasion of Iraq. He later came under investigation by several U. S. government agencies after switching his allegiances to become an instrument of pro Iranian influence in Iraqi politics. In the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), with the assistance of lobbying powerhouse BKSH & Associates, provided a major portion of the information on which the Office of Special Plans based its condemnation of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including reports of weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al Qaeda. Most, if not all, of this information has turned out to be false and Chalabi has been called a fabricator. Along with this, Chalabi also subsequently boasted, in an interview with the British Sunday Telegraph, about the impact that their faulty intelligence had on American policy. These factors led to a falling out between him and the U. S. government. In 2008, Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance Director Jay Garner also stated that he believed Chalabi was an Iranian agent.

Chalabi was the son of a prominent Shia family, His father, Abdel Hadi Chalabi, a wealthy grain merchant and member of the Iraqi parliament, became head of the senate when King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated. His family retired from public life to a farmhouse near Baghdad when the military seized power. Chalabi left Iraq with his family in 1958, following the 14 July Revolution, and spent most of his life in the United States and the United Kingdom. He was educated at Baghdad College and Seaford College in Sussex, England before leaving for America.

In exile, following the Ba'ath party takeover, his family acted as the Iraqi Shia clergy's bankers. In 1969, he earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago under the direction of George Glauberman on the Theory of Knots. after which he took a position in the mathematics department at the American University of Beirut. He published three mathematics papers between 1973 and 1980, in the field of abstract algebra. In 1971, Chalabi married Leila Osseiran, daughter of Lebanese politician Adel Osseiran. They had four children, Tamara, Mariam, Hashem and Hadi. Whilst still at Beirut the civil war broke out in 1975, so he moved to Jordan and found work as an interpreter.

Chalabi was a bold and shrewd investor, amassing a fortune of $100 million During his life he was accused of corruption many times. In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan with Crown Prince Hassan, the King's brother. Petra Bank was the only bank that was unable to meet this requirement. An investigation was launched which led to accusations of embezzlement and false accounting. The bank failed, causing a $350 million bail out by the Central Bank. Chalabi fled the country, in the trunk of a Jordanian prince's car,

Living abroad by 1992 in London, and unable to return home for fear of his life, he set up the Iraqi National Congress with an agenda of regime change for his homeland. The organization was open to all ethnic and religious groups of Iraq, including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Sunni and Shia Muslims. Already a fluent English speaker, he turned his attention to Washington DC. In 1995 after preparation and lobbying he persuaded President Bill Clinton to fund an expedition into northern Iraq to use subterfuge to start an insurgency. Chalabi was convinced that the Iraqi military would rise up to overthrow the dictator. The commanders to whom he had spoken, were the same who openly supported Saddam and crushed his opponents in the Kurdish and Shia revolts. The insurgency failed, lacking the promised ground troops, and 100 insurgents were killed by the military. The command structure of INC fell apart with factional infighting. Chalabi was banned from those frequent visits to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Nonetheless, Chalabi was doggedly determined: in 1998 Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act passing into American law the objective of "regime change" in Iraq. It was reported by BBC News in May 2005 that the Jordanian government was considering whether to pardon Chalabi, in part to ease the relations between Jordan and the new Iraqi government of which Chalabi was a member. According to one report, Chalabi proposed a $32 million compensation fund for depositors affected by Petra Bank's failure. The website for Petra Bank contains a press release stating that Chalabi would refuse the pardon. Although Chalabi always maintained the case was a plot to frame him by Baghdad, the issue was revisited when the U. S. State Department raised questions about the accounting practices of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). Around the same time, the Jordan's Central Bank Governor, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had referred to Chalabi as "one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East". Chalabi headed the executive council of the INC, an umbrella Iraqi opposition group created in 1992 for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 2001 it was revealed that INC was accused of false accounting and irregularities. During the period from March 2000 to September 2003, the U. S. State Department paid nearly $33 million to the INC, according to a General Accounting Office report released in 2004, some of which was used to purchase office artefacts.

Before the Iraq War (2003), Chalabi enjoyed close political and business relationships with some members of the U. S. government, including some prominent neoconservatives within the Pentagon. Chalabi was said to have had political contacts within the Project for the New American Century, most notably with Paul Wolfowitz, a student of nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, and Richard Perle. He also enjoyed considerable support among politicians and political pundits in the United States, most notably Jim Hoagland of The Washington Post, who held him up as a notable force for democracy in Iraq. He was a special guest of First Lady Laura Bush at the 2004 State of the Union Address. Chalabi was flown back to Iraq after the invasion with a force of 700 US trained militia and was, according to the Washington Times, being paid over $300,000 a month by the US government, with the direct support of Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. A later congressionally appointed investigation (Robb Silberman) concluded that Curveball had no relation whatsoever to the INC, and that press reports linking Curveball to the INC were erroneous. The INC often worked with the media, most notably with Judith Miller, concerning her WMD stories for The New York Times starting on 26 February 1998. After the war, given the lack of discovery of WMDs, most of the WMD claims of the INC were shown to have been either misleading, exaggerated, or completely made up while INC information about the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's loyalists and Chalabi's personal enemies were accurate. Another of Chalabi's advocates was American Enterprise Institute's Iraq specialist Danielle Pletka. Chalabi received advice on media and television presentation techniques from the Irish scriptwriter and commentator Eoghan Harris prior to the invasion of Iraq. During the initial ten days of the U. S. invasion of Iraq, American intelligence discovered signs that Ahmed Chalabi was communicating with the Iranians and sharing details about US troop movements with their government. While this act of betrayal angered the Americans, it was largely downplayed at the time. The U. S. aimed to prevent the conflict from spreading beyond Iraq's borders, so it was seen as beneficial that the Iranians were aware that U. S. troops had no intention of entering Iran. When questioned later about his dealings with the Iranian government during that period, Chalabi provided an ambiguous response: "I did not pass any information to Iran that compromised any national security information of the United States." In April as U. S. forces took control during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, Chalabi entered with allied troops the southern town of Shatrah. 300 US trained FIF (Freedom for Iraq Fighters) expected opposition, but none emerged. Thousands of Iraqis cheered the troops. Chalabi returned under their aegis and was given a position on the Iraq interim governing council by the Coalition Provisional Authority. He served as president of the council in September 2003. He denounced a plan to let the UN choose an interim government for Iraq. "We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs," he was quoted as saying in The New York Times. In August 2003, Chalabi was the only candidate whose unfavorable ratings exceeded his favorable ones with Iraqis in a State Department poll. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Iraqis in February 2004 (by Oxford Research International, sponsored by the BBC in the United Kingdom, ABC in the U. S., ARD of Germany, and the NHK in Japan), only 0.2 percent of respondents said he was the most trustworthy leader in Iraq (see survey link below, question #13). A secret document written in 2002 by the British Overseas and Defence Secretariat reportedly described Chalabi as "a convicted fraudster popular on Capitol Hill." In response to the WMD controversy, Chalabi told London's The Daily Telegraph in February 2004, <blockquote>We are heroes in error. As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. In June 2004, it was reported that Chalabi gave U. S. state secrets to Iran in April, including the fact that one of the United States' most valuable sources of Iranian intelligence was a broken Iranian code used by their spy services. Chalabi denied all of the charges, which nothing ever came of. An arrest warrant for alleged counterfeiting was issued for Chalabi on 8 August 2004, while at the same time a warrant was issued on murder charges against his nephew Salem Chalabi (at the time, head of the Iraqi Special Tribunal), while they both were out of the country. Chalabi returned to Iraq on 10 August planning to make himself available to Iraqi government officials, but he was never arrested. Charges were later dropped against Chalabi, with Judge Zuhair al Maliki citing lack of evidence. before the appointment of Ibrahim Bahr al Uloum in May 2005. On protesting IMF austerity measures, Al Uloum was instructed to extend his vacation by a month in December 2005 by Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari, and Chalabi was reappointed as acting oil minister. Al Uloum returned to the post in January 2006. In November 2005, Chalabi traveled to the U. S. and met with top U. S. government officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. At this time Chalabi also traveled to Iran to meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.