Today, the world learned that Ahmad Chalabi, one of the major figures in the lead up to the war in Iraq, has died. As you may remember, neo-conservatives portrayed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, as the "George Washington of Iraq," a secular leader prepared to lead the newly "liberated" country into freedom. He also assured skeptical Americans that coalition troops would find weapons of mass destruction hidden by Saddam Hussein.
After Hussein's overthrow, Chalabi was rewarded for his service by being appointed as Iraq's interim oil minister and later as deputy prime minister. However, his fortunes changed after failing to be re-elected to the Iraqi Parliament. He also found himself in a rivalry with his cousin Ayad Allawi, by then Prime Minister of Iraq.
In 2006, I met Mr. Chalabi at a dinner at the Cambridge Union Society, after listening to a talk by him. Chalabi had by that point become rather bitter towards the United States, his plans for becoming leader of Iraq having fallen through. Consequently, he spoke rather freely in regard to the United States and its leaders.
It was one of the most memorable nights of my life. Not only did I get to meet an international political figure, but I also learned how the most despicable people can be the most charming of all.
I already considered Chalabi to be a horrible person when I paid twenty-five pounds to attend the dinner. I wanted to meet him, not out of admiration, but out of curiosity of what he would turn out to be like. What should you expect to find when meeting a man who sold out his own country and contributed to the start of a war that caused thousands of deaths?
As it turned out, much nicer than one would expect...
Chalabi proved to be an extremely personable, witty man. When told that I was planning to join the State Department after graduation (plans I later dropped), he snarked that "The State Department is at Foggy Bottom, in more ways than one."
He proved even more likeable when gossiping about various Bush administration officials he had encountered. For instance, when asked what Secretary of War Defense Donald Rumsfeld was like, he responded that Rumsfeld was "very intelligent, but not the sort of person concerned with what little brown men think."
However, underneath this charisma was a distinct sense of hypocrisy and untrustworthiness. He claimed that George Galloway, a leading radical politician in the UK government, had been secretly receiving payments from Saddam Hussein's government. The irony of these accusations is that Chalabi himself had been implicated in financial scandals. As Wikipedia describes:
In 1977, he founded the Petra Bank in Jordan.[11] In May 1989, the Governor of the Central Bank of Jordan, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, issued a decree ordering all banks in the country to deposit 35% of their reserves with the Central Bank.[15] 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.[16] Chalabi fled the country before the authorities could react. Chalabi was convicted and sentenced in absentia for bank fraud by a Jordanian military tribunal.[11] Chalabi maintained that his prosecution was a politically motivated effort to discredit him.[11]
More recently, French intelligence had accused Chalabi of being an agent of the Iranian government, assisting an opposition group in Bahrain.
Above all, Chalabi's comments were self-serving in the extreme. He claimed Iraq was in terrible condition because the Americans had not taken his advice. He further argued that his political fortunes in Iraq had declined because of sabotage by the United States.
In the end, meeting the late Chalabi proved to be an educational experience. It helped me learn that the most dangerous people in the world aren't the obviously brutal, violent criminals. The most dangerous people are those who can get thousands of people killed through smooth talking and deceit.