For Iraq-watchers, a tiny but enticing tidbit surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from February 2004, 11 months after the U.S.-led invasion. It involved Ahmad Chalabi, the brilliant, controversial and always fascinating Iraqi politician best known for helping to convince the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The secret cable from the U.S. Embassy in Amman describes a meeting in which Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher accused Chalabi, then the chairman of the finance committee in the provisional Iraqi Governing Council, of opposing closer ties between Iraqi and Jordan. Muasher "blamed Chalabi for spoiling deals negotiated by Jordan's Arab Bank and Export and Finance Bank with Iraq banks" and said he'd complain to Bush administration officials on an upcoming trip to Washington.
There's no love lost between Chalabi and Jordan. In 1989, he had to flee Jordan after a bank he owned collapsed. Three years later, Jordan convicted him in absentia for embezzlement. Chalabi has always maintained that he did nothing wrong and that the prosecution was politically motivated.
The implication in the cable was juicy: Did Chalabi use his government post to settle an old score with Jordan?
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