Word: chalabied
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ahmad Chalabi likes to sleep in. He does his work at night, engaging in endless back-room meetings and talk sessions that often drag on past midnight. On most days he rises late and eats breakfast alone--but last Thursday his wake-up call came early. At 10 a.m., five armored humvees pulled up outside Chalabi's two-story house in west Baghdad. While U.S. soldiers cordoned off the street, seven Iraqi police officers broke down the front door and stormed the living room...
...Chalabi stumbled downstairs to find cops rummaging through his effects and preparing to arrest one of his drivers. "What are you doing here?" he said. "Get out of my house." Upon recognizing Chalabi, a police captain put down his gun and produced arrest warrants for seven of Chalabi's lieutenants. The captain insisted that the raid wasn't at his instigation. "He had no idea whose house it was," says Haider Musawi, an aide to Chalabi. "He said they were just following American orders...
...Chalabi, who four months ago could still boast of Oval Office privileges, being targeted in his own home by his former patrons was stunning enough. But he could do nothing to stop what happened next. An hour and a half after the police finished searching Chalabi's house, a second contingent of cops burst into a compound several blocks away--an ornate mansion known as China House, which serves as the headquarters of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.). The Iraqis pointed guns at Chalabi's guards and ordered them to load the police vehicles with the office's computers...
...father and continued by Bill Clinton--of containing Iraqis with sanctions, a no-fly zone and the occasional clocker to the head, Bush simply decided that containment wasn't working anymore. The Administration spent millions to prop up a dubious group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmad Chalabi--former Central Command boss Anthony Zinni has called them "the Gucci guerrillas from London"--who helped generate the secret "intelligence" needed to create a rationale for pre-emptive war. Much of the intelligence turned out to be flawed or confected, and when the CIA balked at some of the claims, the Pentagon...
...safe bet that the administration hawks around Cheney and Rumsfeld won't push back against the plan to put the UN's man in charge of shaping Iraq's interim government. Nor is the Iraqi Governing Council, whose dissolution Brahimi is recommending, will go quietly. Some, like Chalabi, whose limited political influence in Iraq appears to be entirely dependent on the favor he enjoyed in Washington and his ability to parlay that among other Iraqis on the Governing Council, have made clear they plan to fight against any effort to dissolve the IGC and put the UN in charge...