WITH his death, the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is once again in the news. Detractors rage about his supply of fabricated intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that supposedly tricked Washington into war. Supporters claim he was a heroic dissident who was never given the chance to transform his troubled country into paradise.

Both miss the real story, which is that Mr. Chalabi was less a cause of the Iraq war than a convenient enabler of it. He was an answer to America’s problems, not Iraq’s, and if he had never existed, his backers would probably have conjured up a replacement to serve the same function.

Ever since the United States assumed responsibility for securing the energy-rich Persian Gulf in 1980, it has faced a challenge: how to protect the weaker countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council from the stronger dictatorships to the north, Iraq and Iran. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the situation became acute, and Washington committed itself to pushing his forces back — as the gulf war achieved the next year.

Once Kuwait was freed, however, the administration of President George H. W. Bush remained stuck with the original problem of protecting the G.C.C. from future attacks. Nobody wanted to go on to Baghdad and defang Iraq, but neither did anyone want to keep a large, permanent garrison in the gulf like the one the United States maintains in South Korea.