Ahmed Chalabi

Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi was an Iraqi politician, financier, and exile lobbyist whose decades-long campaign to topple Saddam Hussein placed him at the center of the controversies surrounding the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq. Born on October 30, 1944, in Baghdad to a wealthy Shia merchant and political family that had served the Hashemite monarchy, he left Iraq with his family after the 1958 revolution.

Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, where he earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1969, he taught briefly at the American University of Beirut before founding the Petra Bank in Jordan in 1977. The bank collapsed in 1989, and a Jordanian military court convicted him in absentia of bank fraud in 1992, sentencing him to twenty-two years of hard labor. He always maintained the prosecution was Iraqi-instigated retribution.

From London he founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992 with U.S. encouragement and became Washington's most relentless lobbyist for regime change. Allied with Pentagon neoconservatives, his INC supplied many of the defectors whose claims about weapons of mass destruction shaped the case for the 2003 war, claims that turned out to be largely false. Returning to Baghdad after the invasion, he served on the Iraqi Governing Council.

By 2004 the Bush administration had broken with him over allegations he passed U.S. intelligence to Iran. He held minor cabinet posts and served in parliament but never built a popular base. He died of a heart attack in Baghdad on November 3, 2015.

The name Ahmed is Arabic, the superlative of the root for praise, meaning most praiseworthy. He bore the masculine form.