CHALABI WINS MEETING WITH RICE

You can't keep a bad man down. The rule applies to soap operas, both from fiction and from fact, and next week provides all of us an opportunity to see the return of a genuinely Bad Man.

Ahmed Chalabi was the Iraqi-in-exile who helped convince the Bush Administration that the U.S. would be greeted with flowers and kisses when soldiers invaded Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein. And then Chalabi was the guy who told his good friends in Iran that the U.S. had cracked Iran's secret codes. Nice, huh?

Those who live in reality might assume the U.S. would be interested in cuffing Chalabi and holding him as an enemy combatant in one of America's secret prisons for Bad Guys. But reality is too messy. The Associated Press reports that Chalabi will meet with the secretary of state next week:

Face-to-face meetings with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and probably other senior Bush administration officials await Ahmed Chalabi as the Iraqi deputy prime minister pursues political rehabilitation in Washington ...

Chalabi, who begins his eight-day visit on Tuesday, is due to see Rice on Wednesday and make a speech that day at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that provides personnel and considerable support to the administration.

Chalabi apparently learned the intelligence about Iran from a high-level source in the Pentagon. The CIA turned against Chalabi when it realized he was full of crap and dangerous to U.S. national security. The Bush Administration now chooses to embrace him.