From the NYT, on jockeying to replace Maliki, the current ruler of Bahgdad:

Mr. Chalabi is a complex figure who has alternately charmed and infuriated the Americans but has ties both to them and to Iran. His biggest liability could be his uncompromising support for the systematic purge of many Sunnis from government jobs after the American-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party a decade ago. Mr. Chalabi now says he supports terminating the basis for that purge, the so-called de-Baathification law.

It is far from clear, however, whether any of the suggested successors could gather enough votes. The names floated so far — Adel Abdul Mahdi, Ahmed Chalabi and Bayan Jaber — are from the Shiite blocs, which have the largest share of the total seats in the Parliament. …

From my 2004 American Conservative article “The Neocons’ Man in Baghdad” on Chalabi, who has a Ph.D. in math from the U. of Chicago:

One of the many conundrums revolving around Ahmed Chalabi, that International Man of Mystery, is why so many neoconservatives took seriously his assertions that he was devoted to democracy. In the Wall Street Journal, for example, Seth Lipsky extolled the convicted embezzler as a “democratic visionary.” …

Last February, an Oxford Research survey found that only 0.2 percent of Iraqis consider Chalabi the “leader they trust the most.” Yet, the neocons long assumed that a majority in Iraq would vote for a man on the lam from a sentence of 22 years hard labor in neighboring Jordan for fraud in the collapse of the Chalabi family’s Petra Bank. While the assembled intellects at the American Enterprise Institute might buy Chalabi’s rationalization that Saddam framed him, what mattered is that the common people in Jordan, some of whom lost their life savings, didn’t. From Jordan, Chalabi’s reputation as “Ahmed-the-Thief” filtered into Iraq. …

More generally, Chalabi successfully yanked the neocon chain because they refused to admit to themselves that the age of ideology, in which they usefully argued against communism, ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus, to provide ideological justification for their Iraq Attaq, the neocons resorted to neologisms like “Islamofacism,” a purported dogma alleged to motivate even Muslims as mutually hostile as Saddam and Osama.

In reality, the end of ideology was not the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed. Instead, after two centuries of occasionally battling over what is the ideal form of government, the human race has reverted to its traditional pastime of brawling over who gets to run the government. In understanding affairs of state in the non-Western world today, neither Mein Kampf nor Das Kapital nor the Gettysburg Address is as insightful a guide as The Godfather.

We’re actually better off in our new world where we need to worry more about organized crime clans than about great powers animated by radical ideologies. The Mafia, for all its sins, never targeted a thousand nuclear missiles upon America.