Ahmad Chalabi has never paid much attention to rules. As an international financier, he was convicted in absentia in 1992 of embezzling millions from his own bank in Jordan. In the mid-'90s, the CIA tried to make him its point man in a plan to oust Saddam Hussein, but found he was not controllable, leading to a bitter divorce. "His primary focus was to drag us into a war that [Bill] Clinton didn't want to fight," says Whitley Bruner, the CIA agent who first contacted Chalabi in London in 1991. "He couldn't be trusted." Most recently, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress have been accused of passing on hyped or fabricated reports from defectors on WMD that Saddam didn't have—but which provided the casus belli. Like the CIA, the State Department eventually cut off dealings with Chalabi.

Today Chalabi is in Baghdad and wielding considerable influence as a prominent member of the Iraqi Governing Council. He's overseeing de-Baathification, a purge of alleged Saddam loyalists throughout the country. He apparently has no regrets that his WMD warnings have turned out to be inaccurate. What matters, Chalabi suggested recently, is that he finally got the regime change he had long sought. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful," he told a British newspaper. "That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."