Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi appears to have suffered a humiliating defeat at the recent Iraq polls

Aram Roston:

The news comes just a month after Chalabi had conducted a tour of Washington in an effort to patch up his tattered image in America. Paperwork shows that in November Chalabi’s Washington representative hired a powerful D.C. lobbying firm.

The election results in Iraq may present Chalabi’s ardent U.S. supporters with a quandary: Chalabi, as well as other losing candidates, is alleging fraud in the election, even though the Bush administration hailed the vote as a historic step for democracy in Iraq.

Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) was not part of the coalition, but 35 political groups on Thursday issued a joint statement threatening to boycott Iraq’s new legislature if complaints about tainted voting are not reviewed by an international body.

Preliminary results in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad indicate that Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress scored a minuscule 0.36 percent of the votes.

Out of almost 2.5 million voters in Baghdad, only 8,645 voted for Chalabi.

In the Shiite city of Basra, the results indicate he had an equally dismal showing of 0.34 percent of the vote.

In the violent Sunni province of Anbar, 113 people voted for him.

During the election, Chalabi’s campaign posters proclaimed, "We Liberated Iraq."

The reference was to Chalabi’s role in pushing the United States toward war against Saddam Hussein. Over the years, Chalabi’s group received tens of millions of dollars from the CIA and the State Department.

Chalabi Lacks Votes Needed to Win Spot in Iraqi Assembly

Top Sunni, Shiite groups call vote ‘fraudulent’