Ali A. Allawi has spent much of his life in exile from his native Iraq. Born into a family that had served the royal family that came to grief in 1958, he spent his childhood at schools in England and his career abroad as an academic, engineer and banker. Active among the émigré anti-Baathists in the 1990s, he returned in September 2003 to find his unfortunate country disintegrating into civil war with Britain and America and a troupe of home-grown adventurers and crooks hurrying it on.
After brief and frustrating stints as Trade and Defence Ministers in 2003 and 2004, Allawi was elected to the Transitional National Assembly for the main Shia list, the United Iraqi Alliance, in January 2005 and served as Finance Minister without compromising his reputation for financial probity.
Allawi refused to live in the fortified Green Zone and his ministerial convoy was twice attacked. He left politics with a whole skin last May.
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