Would you like some Chalabi with that?
Salon's Joe Conason writes about a man named Ahmed Chalabi, who formerly headed up the thrid largest bank in Jordan until it crashed and he found himself with, "31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and speculation with the Jordanian dinar." Jordan's government sentenced Chalabi to 22 years hard labor, but he fled the country to live in London, and become a frequent visitor to America.

Articles telling the truth about this man are going to become especially important once we have toppled Saddam's government in Iraq, because Chalabi's name will soon be all over the place, because he is the man slated to run Iraq once we have removed Saddam from power, and/or killed him. Chalabi is the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an organization which is supported by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a group that was founded in 1997, and amongst its membership ranks were Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Straight from the PNAC website, we find this neat, well known factoid:

"Whatever his regrets, Wolfowitz, like others on the campaign team, has defended the elder Bush's overall conduct of the war while faulting the Clinton administration for permitting the Iraqi leader to grow stronger than he was when Bush left office in January 1993. In a Feb. 25, 1998, open letter to Clinton, Wolfowitz joined fellow Bush campaign advisers Richard Armitage, Dov S. Zakheim and Richard Perle--as well as other conservatives--in urging the administration to recognize a provisional government of Iraq headed by the INC." (source)

What this tells us is that the Bush administration, currently taking Saddam out of power, supports putting the INC in power. The head of the INC is Ahmed Chalabi, so if you draw the views of the PNAC and this situation to its logical conclusion, Chalabi is the man who will be the next President of Iraq.

So, to recap, the PNAC, whose members are now heading up the Bush administration, want to install a known criminal as President of Iraq, who has been sentenced to 22 years hard labor in a country that borders Iraq. Sit back and grab some popcorn, kids, because this war ain't gonna be over for another quarter century.