As a member of the Intelligence Community, I have been following the public discussion of the Iraq WMD debacle for years with keen interest. I remember using some of the Iraqi National Congress reports in a paper that I wrote while attending graduate school, and I now realize that the "facts" I had relied on were fictions.

This is why I was eager to read this book, but when I got it in the mail and looked on the back for who had endorsed it, my heart sank. That's because the two endorsers featured there are Seymour Hersh and James Bamford. Given Seymour Hersh's own problems with using tainted sources for his various articles and books, it was not encouraging to see him extolling the virtues of this book. James Bamford's endorsement was even more disturbing because it was so over the top.

So I thought I was going to be reading a leftist screed (it is ironic that some of the books attacking the decision to go into Iraq for getting it wrong on Iraq are sometimes just as blinkered as the reasoning and "intelligence" that got use there).

But I was pleasantly surprised at the tone of the book. It was not over the top like Bamford's endorsement, and it was not laden with questionable "sources" like Hersh employs. Rather I would characterized the tone as one of mixed wonder at Chalabi's success, chagrin at his negative impact on US interests, and mild amusement at it all as well.

For me, the best parts of the book are the ones dealing with the financial shenanigans that --correctly in my view-- got Chalabi a criminal conviction for financial crimes in Jordan. What he was up to in the --for him-- bleak years in the 1990s was also quite interesting as was the discussion of his success in manipulating key US opinion makers, pundits, and journalists.

This being said: the book is not perfect. The sourcing starts getting rather thin near the end of the book (there are only a couple of hundred endnotes all told and given the facts and controversial nature of the book, there should be a lot more). Another thing the author did on several occasions was state things like "It's clear the Iranians got more out of Chalabi than the US did" without specifying any evidence for making that conclusion. Finally, the author is unfair in his criticism of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). This is a non-profit that translates and publishes a good deal of the anti-American, pro-terrorist commentary circulating in Arab world. The author concedes that MEMRI does some service by doing that but then complains that MEMRI only presents the bad...that an equivalent for the Arab and Islamic world would be a service that only translated Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter, and other Americans' lurid diatribes.

That is not really a fair comparison. MEMRI plays up the negative, but the author's contention that there is just as much "crazy talk" in America as there is in the Arabic world is very, very unfair to the US. People like Coulter and Robertson are the exception and not the rule in the US. Contrast this with Egyptian television broadcasting a miniseries about based on the anti-semitic screed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it's not fair to Coulter or Robertson, who crazy as they may be are not advocating violence like many "talking heads" in Arab language media.

Bottom line: The book is well worth reading, and I can only hope that the US will never get itself entangled with Chalabi again. But you never know...

Ahmad Chalabi was born in 1994 into an era in which Iraq was soon to be considered a central front in the war on communism, with the U.S. supporting a despot eventually overthrown en route to Saddam Hussein. Today, Iraq is now viewed as the new central front in the War on Terror, floundering after the U.S. invasion and removal of Saddam.

Chalabi was raised amidst a pocket of wealth in an environment of poverty; the 1958 revolution against the U.S. supported leader cost Chalabi's family much of their wealth and they were forced into asylum in Britain. Chalabi, however, suffered little - attending private American schools, and graduating with a mathematics PhD from the University of Chicago.

Ahmad then taught mathematics at the American University in Beirut, but soon left during the 1975 Lebanon War to run the family bank in Beirut, and then start/run another in Jordan. Eventually the bank in Jordan was closed (not making required deposits in the central bank, 40% of loans were not being repaid, short on capital, multiple insider deals, cooked books, illegal trading in third-world currencies, etc.), and Chalabi convicted of a number of wrongs.

Chalabi then fled to England and ran a bank security firm started with funds from the Jordan bank. Dabbling in anti-Hussein activities led to his recruitment by the CIA. Eventually the CIA blacklisted Chalabi (unclear activities involving Iran, missing funds), and the Saudis, Israelis, and State Dept. did as well.

Chalabi persisted, however, and managed to obtain strong support from American neocons, and American and Israeli think-tanks. The 9/11 attacks proved a boon for Chalabi as he supplied (with more American money) major (but false) story lines to support attacking Iraq: Existence of an Iraq hijacking school, underground WMD hiding places, mobile weapons labs, and links between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

More funds were provided to train/equip an Iraq refugee army (74 showed up for training, vs. 3,000 promised), and to play various Iraq government roles post-Saddam. (Chalabi received less than 1% of votes for President in '05.) Eventually the U.S. investigated Chalabi for his connections to Iran.

Who knows where Chalabi will pop up next!