Our Man Chalabi

After the devastating 60 Minutes piece deconstructed Chalabi, the pile on begins in DC. And no, Chalabi was not the white guy on The White Shadow (now that you mention it, TV Land should do a retro, no?). Ahmed Chalabi, according to Fred Kaplan of Slate, is an egomaniac. And worse. He writes, "What is going on with Ahmad Chalabi? The Iraqi exile, MIT-trained mathematician, and wealthy businessman who plotted with high-level U.S. officials to return to Baghdad and grab the reins in a post-Saddam government�to bring to his homeland the virtues of modernization and Western-style democracy�has now joined forces with Iraq's most prominent anti-American theocrats."

The conservatives also have misgivings about Chalabi. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times:

"(Chalabi) controlled and supervised the appointment of no fewer than six key players, including three ministers � the oil minister, the finance minister, the trade minister, the central bank governor, the head of the trade bank and the managing director of Iraq's largest commercial bank.

"With this kind of power base, Mr. Chalabi's next steps were predictably familiar. They are deja vu ad nauseam in other parts of the developing world. He has placed relatives and cronies in key slots in the new bureaucracy. Promissory contracts totaling some $400 million for Iraqi reconstruction projects have been allocated to Middle Eastern and American business friends.

"On June 30, when chief U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer and his colleagues on the coalition's provisional authority go out of business, and Mr. Chalabi and his fellow Governing Council members recover full sovereignty on Iraq's behalf (pending elections in 2005), the long-time president of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in exile, will be in the financial driver's seat."

Way to go, Neocons.