The following editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Tuesday, Aug. 10:

Back in the halcyon days when statues of Saddam Hussein were toppling and President Bush staged a landing on an aircraft carrier, Ahmad Chalabi and his family looked like the future of Iraq.

Chalabi, darling of neo-conservatives at the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, was named to the Iraqi Governing Council. His Iraqi National Congress, flush with $40 million it had received over the years from the Bush administration, had been airlifted into Iraq compliments of the U.S. Air Force.

Many in the Bush administration thought Chalabi would become Iraq’s new leader. Chalabi’s nephew, Salem Chalabi, was put in charge of prosecuting Saddam. The Yale-educated Salem compiled the evidence for the prosecution and, conveniently, appointed the judge.

But the Chalabis have hit a rough patch. The latest setback is an Iraqi judge’s charge that Ahmad counterfeited money. Our $40 million apparently wasn’t enough. The judge also accused Salem of involvement in the murder of a government minister investigating the Chalabi family. How ironic: an accused political murderer leading the prosecution of the country’s primo political murderer.

The Chalabis, as is their wont, deny everything. Ahmad denied that he embezzled money from a Jordanian bank in 1989, even though he was convicted. He denied that he misled the United States by providing false intelligence before the Iraq war, even though it was a Chalabi defector who invented the phantom biological warfare labs on wheels, nicknamed the “Winnebagos of Death.”

Salem Chalabi, who is in London, and Ahmad, who reportedly returned to Iraq recently, want assurances from Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that they can defend themselves in Iraq’s Central Criminal Court. That could get tricky: Allawi, a rival of Ahmad Chalabi, is a favorite at the CIA, which never liked Chalabi and his Pentagon champions.

The situation would be farcical but for the fact that Ahmad Chalabi’s exile group provided false intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq for which Americans are fighting and dying.

And then there is Ahmad Chalabi’s alleged betrayal of the United States to Tehran. In April, according to UPI, a National Security Agency analyst intercepted a communication from the Iranian intelligence chief in Baghdad reporting that a drunk U.S. official had told Chalabi that the United States had broken Iran’s secret code. Since then the code has been changed, denying the United States intelligence on Iran’s dangerous nuclear program and on Iranian aid to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is currently fighting Marines in Najaf.

Bush and his neo-conservative advisers were played for fools. They supped with Chalabi, armed him, funded him and used his phony intelligence to gin up a war against a country that didn’t have nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Chalabi allegedly betrayed the United States by undermining efforts to deal with a real, and accelerating, nuclear threat in Iran. If any nation prosecutes Chalabi and his drunk U.S. source, it should be the United States.

Copy the Story Link