Ooops!

Do you think the administration might have made a wee little miscalculation here on the whole Chalabi thing?

Of all the errors and miscalculations of the war and the occupation, I think this one is by far the least forgivable. Intelligence is always uncertain, planning is always hard, etc. But "don't trust the advice of exiles" has been part of the political folk wisdom since at least Machiavelli's time. In the particular case of Chalabi, evidence that he should not be trusted was widely available, and widely reported, for several years before the whole march to war ever began. It would have been easy -- very easy -- to get this right.

UPDATE: The available coverage isn't 100 percent clear, but the charge appears to be that Ahmed was producing counterfeit dinars and then his nephew Salem killed Haithem Fadhil, Director General of the Finance Ministry, as part of a coverup. A nasty business, that. Who would have thought that a man with a history of bank fraud on the one hand, and forgery on the other, would get involved in something like counterfeiting? Why, it's almost as if he said, "hey -- I could use my forgery skills to defraud a bank!"