This should make for some interesting debates.....

[RockStar]

"U.S. troops raided a house used by Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi
and searched his party offices in Baghdad on Thursday.

Ahmad Chalabi used to be the Pentagon's fair-haired child, but it is
beginning to look like he played the Pentagon like a violin in the years
leading up to Saddam's overthrow.

First a little background: Chalabi is a Shi'a Muslim. He is the son of a
wealthy banking family whose grandfather, father and brother held
prominent posts in Iraqi governments until Saddam Hussein's Baath Party
seized power in 1968.

He has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a period organizing
resistance in the Kurdish north in the mid-1990s. Chalabi was a math
professor at the American University in Beirut until 1977.

His main political support came from the US Congress, the Pentagon and
parts of the CIA. The US State Department never trusted him -- this
created some tension between Powell and Rumsfeld, although not quite the
'feud' the media describes.

In 1995 Chalabi organized an uprising in the Northern Iraq, which was
called off by the CIA at the crucial moment, and which subsequently led to
the deaths of thousands of insurgents at Saddam's hands.

Chalabi has little support from leaders of the various Iraqi exile groups,
or from Iraqis living in Iraq. The Arab governments in the Persian Gulf
region have told the administration that they would not allow Chalabi to
run a liberation army from their soil, even in an operation mounted with
U.S. help.

The ruling Sunnis of Saudi Arabia distrust Chalabi in part because he is
Shi'a, a branch of Islam whose adherents make up just over half of Iraq's
22 million inhabitants. The Kuwaitis didn't believe he could inspire a
successful revolt and refused to give him a staging area.

On the other side of Iraq, Turkey wanted nothing to do with Chalabi or his
plan. And Jordan would put him in jail were he to return because of a
banking fraud conviction. Chalabi was convicted in absentia of bank fraud
in 1992 by a military court in Jordan, where he had founded a bank that
failed.

Chalabi claimed at the time that the charges were 'politically motivated'.
That's what Chalabi is now claiming about the US raid on his home and
party offices.

Despite all that, the Pentagon was Chalabi's chief supporter in the Bush
administration, based in part on his pre-war intelligence activities. As
president of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group set up in 1992
(in part with CIA money), Chalabi pushed persistently for an armed
overthrow of Saddam.

Chalabi found defectors who affirmed suspicions that Saddam was building
weapons of mass destruction. He assured Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney
that the Iraqi people would greet American liberators with flowers; that
his militia, the Free Iraqi Fighters, would restore order; and that, after
a few months, the vast majority of U.S. troops could go home.

Chalabi assured the Pentagon it need leave behind a small, inconspicuous
force—25,000 to 50,000 soldiers—at bases to be set up well outside the
cities.

The new Chalabi government would then be a vehicle for economic
modernization, Western-style democracy, and—by the force of its
example—the transformation of the entire Middle East.

Of course, it didn't turn out that way."