Profile: Ahmed Chalabi - the saviour of Iraq, or a chancer whose time has come?

Ahmed Chalabi (Getty Images)

If Ahmed Chalabi had his way, he would at this very moment be attending a meeting of Iraqi groups in Nasiriyah, the first step on a royal progress to claim his rightful throne. Alas, things have rarely been straightforward for the best-known contender to be the first president of the gleaming new Iraq that is supposed to rise from the rubble left by America's bombs and the depredations of Saddam Hussein.

In the murk of the battlefield, nothing is murkier than the prospects of Chalabi. The meeting has been put off a few days, at least, and just who will take part, and where it will be held, is unclear. For a decade now, ever since he founded the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the most visible and vocal exile Iraqi opposition group, Chalabi has been a divisive figure. Never though has he been as polarising as now, on the eve of what will be either his greatest triumph or greatest failure.

The divisions say as much about the fissures within the Bush administration as about Chalabi himself. History makes its own rules ­ and so it is that an otherwise unremarkable businessman, who has spent four-fifths of his life outside the country of his birth, is a pivotal figure in a struggle whose outcome will shape events in Iraq and far beyond. Chalabi is the spice of a classic Washington dish, of ambition, personal rivalries and bureaucratic quarrels.

But the crossfire between the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell's State Department masks competing visions of the future of the entire Middle East and Arab world. For the Pentagon and its neo-conservative outriders, Chalabi is the future. For the State Department, he is a charlatan, the repository of extravagant hopes that will end in tears.

Listen to admirers at the Pentagon, in the Vice-President's office and at their various cheerleading think-tanks around town, and he is democracy's truest believer, a noble exile who will be given a hero's welcome by his countrymen.

Take Reuel Gerecht, once a Middle East analyst at the CIA, which shares the State Department's scepticism on Chalabi. These days Gerecht holds forth as a fellow of that neo-con citadel, the American Enterprise Institute, mocking the "Sunni inclinations" of the State Department and his own former employers at Langley, far happier dealing with the sect that numerically dominates the Arab world, but is a minority in Iraq itself.

Their efforts to derail Chalabi will fail, predicts Gerecht, who claims that for all his Westernised ways, the INC leader is a devout Shia who will communicate with the critically important clergy far better than his detractors believe.

And then there is the Israel factor. Saddam portrayed himself as the most steadfast supporter of the Palestinians, and referred to Israel only as the "Zionist entity". Chalabi by contrast has made visits to Israel and has addressed the influential Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. No wonder many see him as an instrument of the grand design of Wolfowitz and others, to make Iraq a beacon of democracy for the Arab world, at ease not only with its neighbours but with Israel as well.

At the State Department and the CIA, the take on Chalabi is utterly different ­ that the neo-conservatives' hero has pulled off one of the great con-tricks in modern history. Somehow a snake-oil salesman has persuaded naive idealists such as Wolfowitz that he is the Garibaldi of modern Mesopotamia. The truth is diametrically opposite, contends the CIA. It cites an internal Agency report on the post-Saddam governance of Iraq, which concluded that "overwhelming numbers" of Iraqis were sceptical of Chalabi, a man they perceived as a carpetbagger and catspaw of Washington, who lived out Saddam's tyranny in the comfort of exile.

The anti-Chalabi faction points to the anonymous Arab foreign minister who told the Los Angeles Times that "almost no one would be worse either for Iraq or the Arab world", and notes that of the six countries bordering Iraq, four have warned Washington that Chalabi should not be given too much power.

Behind his back, his foes have been crueller still. "Spartacus" he was dubbed, for his endless insistence that if the US sent him back to Iraq at the head of a few thousand fighters, Iraqis would rise up and throw off their oppressor. The supposed king in waiting was in reality an emperor with no clothes, a vain and egotistical man whose support was in Washington, not Iraq.

So who is right ­ who is the real Ahmed Chalabi? The confusion stretches back to the beginning. He was born, depending on which source you consult, in either 1944 or 1945, to a prominent Baghdadi family whose members had held senior government posts almost from the moment the British created the modern Iraq after the First World War. In 1956 or 1958 ­ again depending on your source ­ he left Iraq for the US, where he attended such blue-chip institutions as MIT and the University of Chicago. Chalabi obtained a doctorate in mathematics, devoting his thesis to the Theory of Knots. "Whatever else, the guy is smart," says one close observer, less admiring of his ability to create a new Iraq.

Later he taught at the American University in Beirut, until the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975 and he moved to Amman ­ where as usual his connections were impeccable. With the help of King Hussein's brother, Crown Prince Hassan, he set up Petra Bank, which became the second largest private bank in Jordan. In 1989, the bank collapsed amid allegations of financial impropriety by Chalabi, who was forced to flee to Syria hidden, it is said, in the boot of a car. By 1992 he was convicted in absentia of embezzlement and fraud, and his sentence of 22 years' hard labour stands to this day.

Jordan claims the debacle cost the state $300m. Unsurprisingly, Chalabi sees matters differently, insisting he was framed under pressure from his mortal enemy Saddam ­ whom Jordan, highly dependent on Iraqi oil and Iraqi trade, could not afford to offend. Indeed, Amman was one of Baghdad's few supporters in the 1991 Gulf War.

By then, Chalabi had settled in London and had become a British citizen. There he founded the INC, as a non-sectarian organisation open to Kurds, Shias and any other Iraqis who believed in a democratic future for their country. But if London was his base, Washington was where the real power lay and the true anti-Saddam believers were to be found, and the place where his formidable lobbying skills could be wielded with the greatest effect.

Alas, disaster soon struck. In 1995 Chalabi persuaded the Clinton administration that Saddam could be toppled by an uprising in Kurdish northern Iraq, where the INC had already set up shop. But the revolt was a fiasco. The Iraqi army stayed loyal to Saddam, and his 1,000-strong force, bankrolled by the CIA, was swept from the field. So much for the "Spartacus" solution to Iraq's ills.

Since then the Agency and the State Department have shunned him ­ even though Chalabi did win passage in Congress of the 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act, which made "regime change" official US government policy, and allocated funding for the INC out of the State Department budget. A new administration would bring no let-up in his troubles.

In 2001, a government audit discovered irregularities in the INC's use of the money, some of which had gone for paintings to decorate its Washington office, and on gym subscriptions for its staffers.

But with President Bush's "axis of evil" speech of January 2002, Iraq and Ahmed Chalabi were back at the very top of the White House agenda. By late last year, Saddam's days were plainly numbered, and across the administration planning began for the succession. Barely had the first US missile struck southern Baghdad in the early hours of 20 March than he was back in northern Iraq.

Last Sunday, on the express instructions of the Pentagon, Chalabi was ferried to Nasiriyah for his date with destiny. The debate persists, sharper-edged than ever: just who is the real Chalabi?

"He has the potential to be one of the great Arab leaders of the century," Max Singer of the Hudson Institute proclaimed in the neo-conservative National Review last year. For others though, it's the same old Chalabi, "smart but not wise". Another keen student calls him "a chancer, who'd be wonderful fun over dinner, but someone I wouldn't trust further than I could spit backwards". A veteran Middle East specialist remembers the Chalabi of the London years as "rather chubby, immensely affable ­ but at no point did you understand what he really thought". In ruthless but oddly gullible Washington, however, an ability to be all things to all men is often the key to success.

So where will it end? His stock with the Pentagon could not be higher after his prediction ­ scorned by many, but not by Rumsfeld ­ that Saddam could be overthrown by a relatively small force has been vindicated by events. But Colin Powell, with the possibly decisive backing of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, seems to have put any intended coronation on ice.

Even Rumsfeld acknowledges that Iraq's future is for Iraqis alone to decide, not to be imposed by a candidate pre-anointed by Washington. The confabulations between Iraq's external opposition groups and "free Iraqis" from within will not take place before next week, its prospects not improved by the killing of two prominent Shia clerics in Najaf on Thursday.

At least, for Chalabi, the decades of scheming, cajoling, manoeuvring and dreaming are over. Love him or hate him, his moment has arrived. The new Iraq is up for grabs, and the controversy that surrounds him captures perfectly the dilemmas and disagreements of those embarking on the mountainous task of building a new Iraq. Chalabi too seems to understand that. "This is not really about me," he told The New York Times a few weeks ago, when war was certain. "This is about whether people think that Arabs are wogs who really don't deserve, and can't handle, democracy."