Part 2: End of ‘golden age’ in Iraq

‘A sigh of relief’ after forebear's death
Iraqi historian Hanna Batatu describes Chalabi’s great-grandfather as an extremely brutal and powerful man, with his own “special prison at his disposal” and a “bodyguard of armed slaves” that he used to impose his will on the Shiite community of Khadimiya. “When he died the people of Khadhimiyyah heaved a sigh of relief,” Batatu wrote, citing Jawad Chalabi, Chalabi’s elder brother, as the source.

Chalabi’s father, Abdul Hadi, shed the oppressive reputation of his forebear. He functioned as a financier of the Iraqi monarchy, but also of the Shiite clerical leadership in Najaf. Family members say he gave a percentage of his wealth to the Shiite religious leaders, as was expected of those in his position. As for rulers of Iraq, in 1938 Abdul Hadi “got in the good graces of the regent-to-be, ‘Abd-ul-Illah, by coming to his assistance with loans.” The prince, a gambler, “in due course made him a minister of public works and eventually the vice president of the Senate.”

Indeed, a year after young Ahmad Chalabi was born, Prince ‘Abd-ul-Illah brought Abdul Hadi with his entourage to the United States on a state visit. They stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York before going to Washington, D.C., where the prince overnighted at the White House. The Chalabi family was part of the old Baghdad business elite: the word “Chalabi” — of Turkish origin — originally was an honorific applied to high-ranking merchants. As Batatu summed it up, “Translating economic power into political influence, and political influence into economic power, the Chalabis climbed from one level of wealth to another, and on the eve of the 1958 revolution surpassed other business families.”

Pampered and happy, Ahmad Chalabi was a studious boy. And in the play room of his father’s big house, he played ping-pong with Jasseem, the son of a police official who helped to protect the place. He and Jasseem — boys of a different class entirely — played against each other, rhythmically tapping the ball back across the fragile table. Chalabi would later evoke the pleasant times in Iraq that preceded those atrocities of 1958. From his childhood perspective, waist-high to the wealthy, well-educated men around him, this Iraq was an eclectic, tolerant place, where Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Jews, and even Yazidis worked together. Chalabi kept a photograph for decades that he would show to his friends. “It was the board of his father’s company,” as one man recalled, “and it was a Turcoman, a Jew, an Assyrian, a couple Shiite, a couple of Sunni. It was like a cross-section of Iraqi Society, and his big thing was, this is how Iraq was. This is how we were, this is how we will be again!”

It was, in one account by a Chalabi supporter, a “golden age.” He wrote that “Iraq had a constitution, elections, a reasonably free press, a market economy, expanding public schools, a rising middle class.” Another writer described it this way: “Iraq in the 1950s was multiracial and increasingly prosperous.” That Iraq was a place to which anyone would want to return.

And indeed, for the rich, the Iraq of the day was a dreamland. The Iraqis mimicked the British nobility. Iraq even had the only foxhunting between Rome and Peshawar, diplomats would quip. But that Iraq existed for only a privileged few. The real Iraq of the day was  nothing like it. Even the young Ahmad Chalabi must have caught a  glimpse, or a smell at least, of the poverty of that other Iraq. The year before the coup of 1958, he has said, he had traveled to London. Like any boy, he must have looked out the car window on his drive to the Baghdad airport to see the surroundings: “clusters of medieval mud huts, holes for windows, a rusty piece of sheet iron for a door.” That  was the way the Washington Post described it at the time. One historian writes, “Throughout the 1950s massive slums spread around Baghdad, with the hovel inhabitants periodically swamped by muddy overflows from the Tigris.” “The infant mortality [rate] is 250 per thousand. A woman has a 50:50 chance of raising a child to the age of ten. There are no social services of any kind. . . . On the adjacent dumps dogs with rabies dig in the sewage and the slum-dwellers pack it for resale as garden manure.”

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