[Ahmed] Chalabi, longtime exile leader, has never had a power base within Iraq. He is a smooth operator, convicted of embezzling millions from the Petra Bank of Jordan — sentenced in absentia to 22 years of hard labor — but championed by the neoconservatives of Washington. They had lined up Chalabi to be their man in Baghdad years before the conquest of Iraq. [ . . . ] After the war, Chalabi proudly boasted of providing misleading intelligence to the U.S. government that was indispensable in spurring the invasion. He remains on the Pentagon’s payroll — $340,000 a month — not counting the $40 million that he’s received at the insistence of the Republican-dominated Congress over the past decade. He is a focal point of mistrust on all sides within Iraq.
$340,000 a month? For what? He sold the warheads a bill of goods, a fact they seem reluctant to admit, leading to the deaths of more than 500 US servicemen, continues to rake in a tremendous amount of money (in salary and contracts), and is supposed to take over the country, no matter what the people who live there might want.
This is liberation?