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" (Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post) Ahmad Chalabi has died and gone to what I am sure will be a most interesting\u2014and distressingly well-attended\u2014Final Judgment. (The prosecution table is going to need to be about as long as the Euphrates.) Naturally, the New York Times\u00A0has given him\u00A0the Opinions Vary\u00A0sendoff that we should have expected from the newspaper that bought Chalabi&amp;#039;s long con more dearly than most institutions did. His group, the Iraqi National Congress, would get more than $100 million from the C.I.A. and other agencies between its founding in 1992 and the start of the war. He cultivated friendships with a circle of hawkish Republicans \u2014 Dick Cheney, Douglas J. Feith, William J. Luti, Richard N. Perle and Paul D. Wolfowitz \u2014 who were central in the United States&amp;#039; march to war, Mr. Cheney as vice president and the others as top Pentagon officials. Mr. Chalabi&amp;#039;s contention, broadly shared by United States intelligence agencies, was that Mr. Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Hussein had fatally gassed Kurds and slaughtered Shiites and other Iraqis, and he had refused to fully cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. But most of the case for war was predicated on faulty intelligence, including the testimony of defectors. As it became clear that Iraq did not have an active chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program and as the occupying American forces did not receive the welcome that the Iraqi opposition had predicted, the Bush administration distanced itself from him. Well, that&amp;#039;s one interpretation, anyway. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39389/ahmad-chalabi-new-york-times/>