Show time for Iraq 'Spartacus'

This is the make-or-break moment for Ahmed Chalabi, the U.S.-educated banker and convicted felon who has both impressed and alienated a string of U.S. administrations by portraying himself as the Spartacus of Iraq, a warrior-politician who could mobilise tens of thousands to oust Saddam Hussain.

Airlifted by the U.S. military on Sunday into southern Iraq, he now has a chance to prove his claims. Pentagon allies hope Chalabi can demonstrate his popularity and emerge as a leading figure - and possibly the head - of a transitional authority replacing Saddam.

Critics at the State Department and CIA predict that Chalabi and his band of hastily recruited troops will fail to attract widespread support.

No one who has dealt with him is neutral on Chalabi. Although Chalabi fled Iraq in the 1950s as a youth, his backers view him as the country's hope in the 21st century.

"He's a man of courage and devotion and honour. I've known him for 12 years and the better I get to know him the more I respect him," said renowned Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis of Princeton University.

Supporters say he shares with the Bush administration a common vision for a democratic, secular Iraq that encourages free enterprise, eschews extremism and is pro-Western.

Chalabi, a member of Iraq's majority Shiite Muslim sect, is certainly an unusual blend of the traditional Arab orient and the modern West. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics, he has a home in Washington where he once kept a small green leather Holy Quran next to a large book on the architect LeCorbusier on his coffee table.

His detractors portray him as a catalyst for political calamity in postwar Baghdad.

"There's almost no one who would be worse either for Iraq or for the Arab world. I can't think of a single Arab country that would really welcome him even as a visitor," said the foreign minister of one Arab country, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Government officials from four of the six countries bordering Iraq have cautioned the United States against giving Chalabi too much power. American critics cite as warning signs his conviction in Jordan for bank fraud in the 1980s and his close ties to Iran, which he recently has played off against the United States.

They also say his political ambitions and sometimes haughty, imperial ways are flash points for squabbling among the already fractured Iraqi opposition.

Chalabi, leader of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, has repeatedly claimed that he has no ambitions beyond liberating Iraq, after which he intends to get out of politics. And Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that Chalabi's presence in southern Iraq was no indication of any special political support for him.

"Clearly, the United States is not going to impose a government on Iraq," Rumsfeld told reporters. "The Iraqi people are going to sort out what their Iraqi government ought to look like."

But Chalabi's detractors in the Bush administration aren't buying the denials. "Then how come not one of the many other exiles who want a role in post-Saddam Iraq were also brought in?" asked one administration official who, like many interviewed for this article, asked not to be identified.

Some State Department officials in Kuwait were privately furious that Chalabi had been airlifted into southern Iraq, charging it amounted to an unwarranted push to secure him a top role in the postwar government.

"It's really outrageous," said one official who requested anon-ymity. "It means they're throwing their lot in with these INC guys. It amounts to taking sides." Chalabi's spokesman in Kuwait, nephew Feisal Chalabi, said Monday that the INC leader and co-founder's influence is already being felt "everywhere".

"Most of the programmes within the civil administration" that the United States is now designing, "most of the ideas and strategies, you can sense a lot of his influence", he said.

Few Iraqis have worked harder to convince successive U.S. governments that Saddam had to go - and that Washington had to help make that happen.

Chalabi, who once taught mathematics at the American University in Beirut, later headed the Petra Bank in Jordan. In the 1980s, a Jordanian court convicted him in absentia of embezzlement and sentenced him to 22 years in prison. He still is subject to arrest in Jordan, according to senior Jordanian officials.

Chalabi has ties with senior Republicans on Capitol Hill that go back more than a decade. A GOP aide estimated that the Iraqi has met with key Republican senators at least half a dozen times since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, when the INC emerged as a coalition of disparate factions melded into one group - in part to win U.S. support.

"I worked with him for a good five years. He is the only guy I've seen that is able to organise the Iraqi opposition and hold them together," said Sen. Sam Brownback of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"He's bright and tireless and he really works at holding the big principles together. The big focus has been bringing democracy into Iraq and on that he does not alter."

Chalabi, a British citizen and London resident, works Washi-ngton better than many politicians, both allies and critics say. Vice President Dick Cheney is one of his supporters.

He's worked closely with former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and Gen. Wayne Downing, who served on the Bush administration National Security Council, to develop political and military plans to topple Saddam.

"A lot of people in his situation might have devoted themselves to their own selfish pursuits. Chalabi could have lived comfortably without spending a day on the effort to liberate Iraq," said Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long advocated support for the INC and overthrowing Saddam. But Chalabi may have stronger backing in the United States than in Iraq.

A recent CIA report on Iraqi sentiments about a post-Saddam government concluded that "overwhelming numbers" of Iraqis were suspicious and skeptical of Chalabi and the INC, according to a U.S. official familiar with the assessment.

The report came to the same conclusion about the Iran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has been an on-again, off-again INC ally. They are the two largest exile groups and both have ties with the United States.

In an interview in September, Chalabi dismissed the accusations that his group lacks strong support in Iraq.

"That's an old mantra," he said. Until Saddam is toppled, he asserted, it would be difficult for any exile group to prove its popularity. "It's hard to demonstrate support in a country with a totalitarian system," Chalabi said.

"Was Stalin beloved of the Russians and Georgians? Was he or not? Was Hitler beloved of the German people? It's difficult to get people to cross the line between their own personal experiences and their own sense of political support in their own societies and how these symbols and mechanisms can be manipulated by such modern totalitarian met