Iraq's parliamentarians earn about $270,000 a year in salary and benefits. So why are they stealing money from their security guards?

This is the charge leveled against lawmakers by the guards themselves, who quietly stepped forward in recent months to complain that they weren't receiving their full allotted salaries of roughly $600 a month. One guard reportedly said that he was receiving only about $210, and there were reports of lawmakers' offices inflating their payroll with "ghost employees" to skim off more money.

This practice is hardly the norm among all lawmakers, but it's become enough of an issue that the new parliamentary speaker, Osama al Nujaifi, earlier this week set new rules to regulate allocations and benefits. Lawmakers will now have to produce official documents from each security guard as a condition to receive funds, in an attempt to crack down on ghost employees. And Nujaifi also said that guards now could come to parliament themselves to receive their salaries directly.

It's part of an aggressive series of moves by Nujaifi in his first days as speaker, and it suggests that the Sunni politician from the northern city Mosul is going to make something out of his position, perhaps building it up into a counterweight to the powerful office of the prime minister, Nouri al Maliki, a Shiite. Nujaifi has also backed an investigation demanded by Sunni lawmakers to investigate the abrupt closure last month of the popular independent Baghdadiya TV channel, which was denounced by free-speech groups.

Given the disdain with which most Iraqis view their politicians, Nujaifi can certainly score points in the new government by cleaning up corruption and thievery and by trimming the fat from Iraqi officialdom. The funds allocated to each lawmaker's office for hiring contract employees is about $20,000 per month, spread over as many as 30 people. The monthly base salary (not including car, housing and expense allowances) for just one lawmaker? About five times that.

(With reporting by Sahar Issa in the McClatchy Baghdad bureau)

It's not going to feel like much of a Christmas in Iraq this year.

This morning, at Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, the mood was somber. I counted three worshippers. One was a girl, a tiny brunette of no more than 10 years old, who walked to the front of the church clutching her school report card. She knelt at the altar in front of a picture of her cousin, who was inside the church during evening mass on Oct. 31, when terrorists stormed the building and took the worshippers hostage before detonating suicide vests. Dozens were killed, including the girl's cousin.

The attack, and a smattering of others in recent weeks against Iraq's vanishing Christian community, have led to a feeling of siege this Christmas. Human rights groups say that Christians have been targeted with rocket attacks and received threats by mail and text message. On Wednesday, wire services reported that Christians in three Iraqi cities had decided to cancel Christmas observances after receiving threats.

The Chaldean Catholic archbishop in the northern city of Kirkuk told AFP that he and 10 other Christian leaders received warnings from the Islamic State of Iraq - a terrorist group linked to al Qaida in Iraq, which claimed responsibility for the Baghdad attack - that persuaded him to cancel the traditional Christmas feast. Only masses will be held, and only in the morning, Monsignor Louis Sako said.

AP reported that Santa Claus wouldn't be coming to Kirkuk this year, saying an appearance outside one of the town's churches had been called off.

In Mosul and Basra, two other Baghdad cities that are home to members of the dwindling Christian community - which stands at about 500,000 now, down from more than 1 million in the Saddam Hussein era - Christian leaders have told their flock not to put up Christmas decorations.

In Baghdad, Christian leaders said they planned to go ahead with subdued Christmas commemorations - amid intense security precautions. Concrete blast walls now surround Our Lady of Salvation church, put up several days ago, a security guard said. A church in the capital's Zafaraniyeh neighborhood has done the same. Outside another church I visited this morning, tangles of barbed wire were scattered across the road.

Human rights groups have called on the new Iraqi government to do more to protect its Christian community. Violence in Iraq this year was at its lowest since 2003, but it remains a dangerous place for minorities. Dozens of Christian families have fled Iraqi cities this fall for the relative safety of the northern Kurdistan region and for neighboring Syria and Jordan.

For them, and for their thousands of brethren remaining in Iraq, it will be a Christmas tinged with indescribable sadness.

For Iraq-watchers, a tiny but enticing tidbit surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from February 2004, 11 months after the U.S.-led invasion. It involved Ahmad Chalabi, the brilliant, controversial and always fascinating Iraqi politician best known for helping to convince the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The secret cable from the U.S. Embassy in Amman describes a meeting in which Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher accused Chalabi, then the chairman of the finance committee in the provisional Iraqi Governing Council, of opposing closer ties between Iraqi and Jordan. Muasher "blamed Chalabi for spoiling deals negotiated by Jordan's Arab Bank and Export and Finance Bank with Iraq banks" and said he'd complain to Bush administration officials on an upcoming trip to Washington.

There's no love lost between Chalabi and Jordan. In 1989, he had to flee Jordan after a bank he owned collapsed. Three years later, Jordan convicted him in absentia for embezzlement. Chalabi has always maintained that he did nothing wrong and that the prosecution was politically motivated.

The implication in the cable was juicy: Did Chalabi use his government post to settle an old score with Jordan?

I met Chalabi at one of his Baghdad homes on Thursday night and put the question to him. The smooth talking politician, dapper as always in a navy suit and matching tie, said that he had indeed blocked the bank deals -- but had a ready explanation. His committee, he said, had obtained documents showing that the Mukhabarat, Iraq's feared secret police, had attempted to open an account in the Swiss branch of Jordan's Arab Bank, and that an officer in the Mukhabarat was holding a deposit in a Dubai office of the bank.

"So I said no," Chalabi said. At the time, the Mukhabarat was accused of abuses and filled with Saddam loyalists and Baath Party members -- and there was perhaps no more bitter opponent of Saddam than Chalabi. If Arab Bank were allowed to open up in Iraq, he told me, "it will facilitate the transfer of the money from these (offshore) accounts to help the Baathists and terrorists do things without the thing going through the international banking system. They could do an international transfer within the bank itself."

In January 2004, Chalabi traveled to Washington and met with President Bush and other senior U.S. officials in the Oval Office. After the meeting, L. Paul Bremer, then the American viceroy in Iraq, took Chalabi aside and asked, "Why are you blocking the opening of Arab Bank in Baghdad?"

Chalabi explained what he found and Bremer asked him to pass the evidence to his staff in Baghdad. "I gave them copies of the documents and nothing more was said about it to me," he said.

So, it seems, there you have it. It's a bit inside baseball, but any story involving Chalabi, the Bush administration and the early days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is worth telling, even almost seven years later.

(Photo of 2010 Chalabi campaign poster by Hannah Allam/MCT)

Muasher said that Zebari had underscored the desire of the Iraqi government to cooperate closely and cement good relations with Jordan, “regardless of the opposition of Ahmed Chalabi.” Muasher said he told Zebari that Jordan, too, wanted close cooperation with Iraq, but blamed Chalabi for spoiling deals negotiated by Jordan’s Arab Bank and Export and Finance Bank with Iraq banks. Muasher said he would be raising this issue with senior USG officials on his upcoming trip to Washington.