Why did the US remove leadership from Chalabi in lieu of Allawi?

[librarycard]

Is there both an "official" and real reason?

[lapfog_1]

1. I'm pretty sure

that the real reason is that they discovered he was really
an Iranian agent who sold them a bill of goods and leaked
secrets back to Iran.

He was the darling of the Neocons and BFEE before that, and they
believed everything he said. They are soooo stupid.

[punpirate]

2. Probably a tough one to call without more information....

But, it's clear that the neo-cons still love Chalabi (maybe intimately). My guess is, because they put him in the finance ministry, that he got caught with his hand in the till, and someone at State decided he was simply too big a liability--with any chance that he'd get caught, they weren't going to make the mistake of him running the country.

Other possibilities--Chalabi had, up until the so-called handover, been making lots of overtures to the Shia clerics, trying to present himself as one of them, to improve his power base, and I doubt that the US was pleased with that--the Shia are the clear majority in Iraq, and the group most inclined to adopt a theocratic state of some description. The US doesn't even want to think about that prospect.

The other unofficial reason might well be that Allawi is much more of the sort of tough guy that the US wants--he'll do what the US wants, while Chalabi would always be inclined to drift off into his own personal agenda, which is, as always, to make lots of money on the deal. No telling what sort of arrangements he might make in the process of feathering his own nest.

Cheers.

[Disturbed]

3. Could be...

because they finally realized that he would stab them in the back first chance he got. He has 25 tons of Saddam documents hidden somewhere so they can't mess with him too much. The CIA would like to get him arrested because they know what a slime bad he is but Tenet probably got fired for going after him. Now he will probably be assasinated as soon as they can find those documents. Of Course that will be blamed on insurgents.

[Aidoneus]

4. Mostly..

because Chalabi was/is a dirty whore of a joke that everybody played and nobody liked. Ayad `Alawi is a geniune thug and killer (his "terrorist" outfit spent the 90s blowing shit up with US-UK money, including a schoolbus and movie theatre), well-skilled in the rules of the facade he's supposed to prop up and learns his script very quickly. That's the kind of guy "we can do business with" (shady dirty dealings in an psycho-capitalist planet), because they can "provide stability" (kill a lot people with the weapons they bought from us) and "build democracy" (put all power into the richest Wall St.-friendly klan of quislings).