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Amid all this boasting about its lucrative connections, IILG is surprisingly modest about the family connections of its founder, Salem Chalabi. The website doesn't mention that he is a nephew of Ahmed Chalabi, who just happens to be the leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC), a member of the governing council and current president of Iraq. Uncle Ahmed, a former banker in Jordan, fled the country in 1989 before he could be arrested in connection with a $200 million financial scandal. He was later tried in his absence and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years in prison on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.
But has never looked back. Despite being detested by the State Department and the CIA, Ahmed Chalabi found strong support in the Pentagon and US Congress, which generously provided funds in support of his opposition to Saddam Hussein through the INC.
One of Ahmed Chalabi's staunchest supporters in Washington is Douglas Feith, a former lawyer who is currently third in the Pentagon pecking order. The pair worked closely together in the run-up to war, with Chalabi providing "intelligence" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (much of which proved to be wrong) and boasting that he had a secret network inside Iraq which could be harnessed to help run the country once the US invaded.
In the event, the network did not materialise and consequently, Feith and Chalabi share a large part of the blame for the present mess.
Feith, meanwhile, has close links to the Israeli Likud party and the country's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. He was one of the authors of the famous Clean Break document, published in 1996, which proposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the first step towards reshaping Israel's "strategic environment" in the Middle East.
I wonder if Chalabi has taken a cue from Feith, vis a vis Sharon, to say yesterday that Iraq will be capable of independence from the US very soon. What does the Arab world think about Israel having a direct hand in this invasion, "as the first step towards reshaping Israel's "strategic environment" in the Middle East?"
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