WE SHOULD HAVE PUT HIM IN POWER IN THE SUMMER OF '03:

Ahmad Chalabi Is on the Brink of a Comeback (ELI LAKE, February 9, 2005, NY Sun)

The former Iraqi exile leader who helped found the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, is seeking his country's highest office and says he has accepted an informal nomination to be prime minister.

In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Chalabi said he had said yes to the request from prominent members of the United Iraqi Alliance list, the slate of candidates that will likely control a majority of seats in the transitional national assembly to be announced in the coming days.

Among Mr. Chalabi's supporters is the leader of a resistance against Saddam Hussein in southern Iraq in 1991, Abdul Karim Al Muhammadawi, known as the "prince of the marshes." Mr. Chalabi has also garnered support from a former member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Salama al-Khufaji,who is one of the highest-ranking women on the UIA list. Mr. Chalabi also draws support from the Shiite Political Council, the organization he helped build this summer after he was excluded from the interim government headed by Prime Minister Allawi.

If Mr. Chalabi manages to secure enough support to be prime minister of Iraq, it will mark an extraordinary comeback for the man most analysts wrote off last May, when American and Iraqi soldiers raided his home and confiscated computers on charges that he had employed thugs to bully bureaucrats in the finance ministry. Throughout last summer, Mr. Chalabi was targeted by an untrained judge appointed by the Americans; all charges were eventually dropped. The CIA had written off the former banker as having no political base in Iraq, while leading Democratic politicians blamed him for fabricating intelligence on Saddam Hussein's links to Al Qaeda and arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Lost in the hullaballoo about the CIA's ridiculous overestimates of Iraqi military capabilities was the more important question of why the Agency was running operations against the Bush Administration and American interests, the two worst examples of which were the Palme affair and the attempt to discredit Mr. Chalabi. That is unless that last attempt was just a smokescreen to strengthen his hand by distancing him from association with the U.S. But that assumes a competence the CIA lacks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2005 6:47 PM