Maybe he speaks from his own observation, was there when it happened? Perhaps the Senate will share your curiosity and invite Mr. Chalabi to inform their members, as he once offered.

Securing a quid pro quo understanding to not disrupt mainforce unseating of the Baathists in 2003 seems practical, not nutty. That was the era in which the Khatami liberals either did or didn't put out feelers for raproachment with the US, which the Bush admin either did or didn't bother to read.

The versatile Mr. Chalabi would at that time be high on the list of those qualified to broker backdoor contacts, either implicit or explicit. Maybe by whispering in Laura's ear, or lunching with Richard Perle.

Chalabi was accused (by US intel types, costing Doug Feith his security clearance again) of tipping the Iranians off that we were reading their diplomatic signals from the New Baghdad. And seen shuttling back and forth to Tehran. Chalabi also has operated well with Team Barzani's Kurds, who have their own interesting contacts with various power centers on the Persian side.

Here's an interesting clip from Robert Baer's new book The Devil We Know:

I went to see Feith in the summer of 2000, just about the time George W. Bush had won the Republican nomination for president, to talk about Iran. Feith was upbeat. He knew that if Bush won the White House, he could pretty much pick any job he wanted. He was in private law practice then, but he was a star in the Republican foreign policy brain trust

Before we met, I had been certain Feith would understand the threat Iran posed to Iraq. When he was in the Reagan administration, he surely had read the intelligence reports that Iran was behind the bombings of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and the Marine barracks in October 1983. Feith also had lived through Iran-Contra and should have remembered how exiles and middlemen manipulated policy to their own ends, ending up deceiving both sides—Iran and the United States.

But as we sat at opposite ends of the couch in his office, Feith wanted to talk about Iraq, not Iran. Could the Iraqi exiles overthrow Saddam Hussein? Or more to the point, did Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress stand a chance of getting rid of them? Feith thought that Chalabi could, given a little help.

Listening to Feith, I wondered why he wasn't more skeptical of Chalabi, a lifelong exile who hadn't seen Baghdad since he was a child. More to the point, I wondered why Feith wasn't more suspicious about Chalabi's ties to Iran. In the nineties, Chalabi had traveled through Tehran to get into Kurdish northern Iraq. He also had unexplained ties to Iran's hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one reason the Clinton administration dropped contact with him.

I pointed this out to Feith, telling how in 1994 and 1995, Chalabi had turned over Iraqi National Congress houses and cars to Iranian intelligence, which then used them to stage the assassinations of Iranian dissidents living in the part of Iraq Saddam controlled. Didn't this sound suspicious to Feith? And that wasn't to mention Iran's long-term interests in Iraq, with or without Chalabi. I wondered why Feith couldn't draw the obvious parallels between Iraq and Lebanon, which Iran was then effectively annexing.

The longer Feith didnt respond, the more I wondered whether he thought I was making all this up, trying for some inexplicable reason to undermine Chalabi. I told Feith that if George Bush won the presidency, he'd be in a position to confirm everything I'd just told him.

At that Feith stood abruptly and thanked me for my visit.

“Ahmed Chalabi will be a wonderful leader of Iraq,” he said firmly, before showing me out and closing the door behind me.

Pages 17-18, The Devil We Know: Dealing With The New Iranian Superpower

I guess it is appropriate that in the photo you (or the editors?) included, Chalabi is off-center and slightly out of focus.

Those Repubblica reporters, Carlo Bonini and Giuseppi d'Avanzo -the fellows who broke the Nigergate forgery story- wrote a story on meetings held in Rome prior to the invasion of Iraq...

"Francis Brooke had more influence in Tehran than Chalabi[...]Ahmed Chalabi and his right-hand men, Karim and Brooke, travelled with Pentagon and American Enterprise Institute teams...meetings organized in Rome assembled [...] Michael A. Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode of the Office of Special Plans, the colonels of the Iraqi National Congress and in addition, the Iraqi Shi’ites of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and of course, the Guardians of the Revolution."

Where's Brookie now?

It wasn't enough that Chalabi had been previously discredited by our intel services, nor that he gave Bush a Curveball who was proven to be a liar before Bush invaded Iraq.

Now Chalabi is throwing another screwball. He tries to pin sole blame on Bush, independent of his own instigations and meddling throughout the process.

The man has the same credibility - and aims - of former Goldman Sachs execs-turned-government-econ-fixers. He enriched himself at every step of the way and views everything in terms of his personal fortunes. He's a liar and a far bigger pirate than the amateurs working the Somalian coast.

While he obviously has some influence in Iraq's power circles, solely because his money buys access, I suspect the Arab street views him as just another fatted dog deserving of a closetfull of well-thrown shoes.

Wasn't there a period of something like cooperation after the invasion of Afghanistan? I remember initially Bush wanted us out of Iraq pretty quickly and a UN force put in. That was one of the reasons for the light footprint and all that. So maybe there was some vague agreement that Iran would play a role in stabilizing the south.

We know from Flynt Leverett, Trita Parsi and Lawrence Wilkerson about the so-called "Grand Bargain" offered by Iran in 2003. Reportedly, Iran offered assistance in rebuilding Iraq.

There is also a precedent of secret negotiations with Iran. Iran-Contra being one, the alleged October Surprise being another.

It's not implausible.

I also wonder if he ever bothered to mention to his American sponsors his view that toppling Saddam would benefit Iran.

I wonder why he would need to mention it. After the long war of attrition, I would think that it would be obvious that Iraq and Iran balanced each other as regional powers. Toppling one would would enhance the other's power.