Was Chalabi the intended scapegoat all along so they could have their war?

From Friend to Foe
After a startling raid in Baghdad, the U.S. launches an investigation into its former ally Ahmad Chalabi. Was he working for Iran?
By ROMESH RATNESAR


Ahmad Chalabi likes to sleep in. He does his work at night, engaging in endless back-room meetings and talk sessions that often drag on past midnight. On most days he rises late and eats breakfast alone—but last Thursday his wake-up call came early. At 10 a.m., five armored humvees pulled up outside Chalabi's two-story house in west Baghdad. While U.S. soldiers cordoned off the street, seven Iraqi police officers broke down the front door and stormed the living room.

Chalabi stumbled downstairs to find cops rummaging through his effects and preparing to arrest one of his drivers. "What are you doing here?" he said. "Get out of my house." Upon recognizing Chalabi, a police captain put down his gun and produced arrest warrants for seven of Chalabi's lieutenants. The captain insisted that the raid wasn't at his instigation. "He had no idea whose house it was," says Haider Musawi, an aide to Chalabi. "He said they were just following American orders."

For Chalabi, who four months ago could still boast of Oval Office privileges, being targeted in his own home by his former patrons was stunning enough. But he could do nothing to stop what happened next. An hour and a half after the police finished searching Chalabi's house, a second contingent of cops burst into a compound several blocks away—an ornate mansion known as China House, which serves as the headquarters of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (i.n.c.). The Iraqis pointed guns at Chalabi's guards and ordered them to load the police vehicles with the office's computers, documents and files. Outside, a group of Americans dressed in civilian clothes watched with approval while smoking Cuban cigars and drinking sodas taken from Chalabi's office fridge. An i.n.c. official tells Time the Americans identified themselves as FBI and CIA but refused to show identification. "The Americans were sitting there, egging on the Iraqis," says the official. "They sat on the veranda saying things like 'Good job, keep at it.'" Then the Iraqis ransacked the place, seizing weapons, ripping down pictures of Chalabi's father, even confiscating a copy of the Koran. An Iraqi officer smashed a framed photograph of the Pentagon's favorite exile himself. "Chalabi is finished," he said. In an occupation marked by dizzying strategy shifts and policy repudiations...

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With questions swirling about Chalabi's fidelity, Administration neoconservatives who once blessed Chalabi as Iraq's President-in-waiting but have watched their influence wane as Iraq has descended into chaos fell over themselves last week trying to cut loose their former friend. One of Chalabi's Pentagon boosters, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, insisted to Time that "there's all this stuff about his advising us on policy and his being highly influential, and it is wildly overstated. The stuff that's been reported about us being very close is just wrong." A top Administration source says Vice President Dick Cheney, who lobbied to continue to give financial assistance to the i.n.c. in the run-up to the U.S. invasion, saw Chalabi as merely "one of many" exiles who could aid the U.S. in Iraq. Asked by Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan whether the U.S. was "duped by a con man" into going to war, Air Force General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded, "I think that remains to be seen. Probably. But I just don't know."


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040531-641077,00.html

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shocked by it though.

going to have it his way...with the recent news of Cheney's Halliburton deal makes ya wonder