I met Chalabi in Beirut in 1972 in the early stages of his long campaign to bring down Saddam Hussein. Going it alone and engendering controversy are nothing new for this U.S.-educated math professor, whose Amman bank was confiscated by Jordanian authorities in 1989 amid allegations of corruption.

Those allegations did not prevent the Clinton administration from approving CIA funding of Chalabi's INC organization for nearly four years in the 1990s. Only in 1997, when he went public in an interview with me about the CIA's expensive, ambivalent and failed covert efforts to overthrow the Iraqi dictator, did Chalabi become a target of agency ire, defamatory leaks and worse.

More recently Chalabi added White House staffers and occupation chief Paul Bremer to the long list of those he has offended and challenged with his domineering manner, prickly sense of nationalism and unshakable self-confidence. By coming out in open, bitter opposition to the latest U.S. transition plan and its rehabilitation of senior Baathists, Chalabi seems to have crossed a final red line.

It has now been replaced with a whole new indictment: that Chalabi tricked the United States into war, possibly on Iran's behalf, and that he has given national security secrets to Iran. The first half of this is grotesque on its face. Even if you assume the worst to be true\ufffdthat the INC's "defectors" were either mistaken or were conscious, coached fabricators\ufffdthe fact remains that the crucial presentation of the administration's case on WMD and terrorism was made at the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting right behind him, after those two men most hostile to Chalabi had been closeted together. Nor does the accusation about an alternative "stove pipe" of disinformation, bypassing the usual channels, hold much water (or air, or smoke). Woodward's book Plan of Attack makes it plain that the president was not very impressed with Tenet's ostensible evidence. The plain and overlooked truth is that the administration acted upon the worst assumption about Saddam Hussein and that he himself strongly confirmed the presumption of guilt by, among many other things, refusing to comply with the U.N. resolution. This was a rational decision on the part of the coalition. After all, German intelligence had reported to Chancellor Schr\ufffdder that Saddam was secretly at work on a nuke again: The French government publicly said that it believed Iraq had WMD, and even Hans Blix has stated in his book that at that point, he thought the Baathist concealment apparatus was still at work. Whoever and whatever convinced all of these discrepant forces, it was not Chalabi's INC or [link|http://slate.msn.com/id/2101294/|Judith Miller's work] in the New York Times.