Standard Factory

Can anyone tell me how much a 2002 champion 3 bedroom 2 bath mobile home is worth?

Any one know the room sizes on a 1995 16'x76' or 80' champion 3 bedroom single wide mobile home thanks starting on one side room order is bedroom, small bath ,bedroom, living room, kitchen, master bedroom, then master bath thanks

Should we buy a mobile home? My fiance and I live in a two bedroom apartment. To make a long story short, we aren't very happy living here... we have a room mate who is very uncleanly, the bathroom is in the room mates bedroom, his dog isn't potty trained... and many more reasons why we hate this apartment. Well, we looked at a very nice 1997 Champion Atlanta mobile home for sale for 17,300. We were approved for the loan from the bank. Its in a decent area, on the edge of a mobile home park. Problem is, we will be buying the trailer and not the land. We are very tight on money. Should we stay in this crappy apartment, or buy this trailer? (We don't want to buy a house yet, because we have a low income, and we would only be able to get a house for like 30K which wouldn't be in good shape. We don't want to rent a different apartment, because we are allowed pets here.)

Does anyone know the correct trivia answers for US 99.5, and other radio stations for October 22, 2008? Good Morning all! Before They Were Famous: C) mobile home saleswoman Champions: A) a penalty shot is awarded Concierge: Big Bang Country Music Trivia: C) Jimmy Wayne Domino’s: not (is not a guarantee, but an estimate) This Day in U.S. History: A) Canada Video of the Day Trivia: at (How do I eat smart?) You Can Quote Me: A) Rudolph Newsletter: Orchard Artist: Deans: sour cream Nascar: E Taylor Swift: Fox All Access: # 75 country festival Happy Birthday Month to: Kmlisa7 (7th), sheb12 (11th), Stagelady_99 (11th) Gracie (21st) and last but not least Beecher! (27th) Who We Are and the stations we listen too! 92.5 JOE FM EDMONTON, AB 92.5 WWYZ HARTFORD, CT. 92.5 LONE STAR 92.5 XTU PHILADELPHIA 92.5 WBEE ROCHESTER, NY 92.5 THE WOLF, DENVER 92.9 DAVEFM ATLANTA, GA 93.7 THE BULL TRIVIA 93.9 MOVING CALIFORNIA 94.9 THE SOUND WSWD FM CINCINNATI OHIO 95.3 NEW COUNTRY, HAMILTON ONTARIO 95.5 WFMS INDIANAPOLIS 95.7 MYCLUB MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 96.5 WCMF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK 96.7 THE TWISER ARLINGTON, TEXAS 98 WPXY ROCHESTER, NEW YORK 98.7 KUPL PORTLAND, OR 99.5 WUSN CHICAGO, IL. 99.5 THE RIVER ALBANY, NEW YORK 99.5 WGAR CLEVELAND, OHIO 99.5 THE WOLF TEXAS COUNTRY 99.5 WZPL Z99 INDIANAPOLIS, IN 100.1 KZST SANTA ROSE, CA 100.3 KILT FM HOUSTON, TX Y101 OTTAWA, ONTARIO 102.1 EDGE DALLAS 102.5 KSFM SACRAMENTO, CA 102.9 MIX 103.9 CISN EDMONTON, AB 105.1 GO COUNTRY LOS ANGELES, CA C105 CALGARY, ALBERTA 105.9 WHCN THE RIVER HARTFORD, CT 105.7 KYKX LONGVIEW, TEXAS 106.1 WMIL MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN 106.1 KISS FM DALLAS, TX 106.1 KISS SEATTLE, WASHINGTON Q107 CLASSIC CALGARY, AB Z107.7 ST. LOUIS, MO 107.9 WNTR THETRACK INDIANAPOLIS, IN Five more days Beecher! Hope all are doing good! Thank You all for all of your help! Did anyone get a newsletter yesterday?

Is this a good Resume for a person seeking their first job? Can you also suggest where I can improve it, or if there is any errors? Personal Details Name: (my name) Address: (my address) Home Telephone: (my number) Mobile: (my number) Email Address: example@hotmail.com D.O.B: 1/1/1 Personal Profile I am 14 years old seeking a part-time job. I am reliable, patient and eager to learn. I also work well with others, in a team environment. Education Schools: Burnside Primary School, Nambour – Grades 1-7 St John's College Nambour - Grade 8, 9, starting year 10 Subjects Undertaking: English, Maths, Science, Physical Education, Study of Society and Environment, Religious Education, Wood Technology, Computer Communications, Culture of Learning, Food and Nutrition. Most Recent Results (end of semester 2): Maths: A- English: A- Science: A Computer Communications: A Achievements Academic Gold Award (2007) Netball -Nambour Representative (2006-2008, currently playing) -St John's 1st's (Senior A Division) Nambour Swim Club Age Champion (2004 -2008) In the winning team for the St John’s Readers Cup competition (2007) St John’s Cultural Award (2008) Work Experience Junk mailing/Letter box deliveries (2002 -2008) Umpiring Netball – Saturdays and Mondays (2007-2008) Computer Skills Can competently use the following Microsoft software: Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, PowerPoint Interests/Activities Netball (School, Club and Rep) Reading Swimming Socialising/ working with others

is she right? last week i told my g/f i was dumping her, when she asked why i just said because you are fat, and that you need to shower more regular. she was a little upset. she also asked if i was seeing someone else and i said, yes, my wife remember. she threatened to tell her regardless if i stayed with her or not. I just laughed at her, got out of bed, showered, asked her to iron my jeans, collected my dry cleaning she picked up for me, read the paper had some breakfast and went back home. i told her that my wife is just another dumb woman who knows her place, in the home or kitchen and wouldn't believe her anyway. last night she called me on my mobile to see if i would go to the movies with her, i told her to never to call me again. i was with my other g/f at the time. the woman i was with at the time was a little angry too that i was with her, so soon after the breakup, ah well... she was also telling me that Arsenal are going to win the champions league this year, is she right?

which laptop is better for gaming? I wanted a good laptop for everthing but mostly games. I wanna play a game called champions online. it has better graphics then WoW so i want to know if one of these 2 would be better to buy. HP - Pavilion Laptop with AMD Turion™ II Dual-Core Mobile ProcessorWhat's Included HP Pavilion Laptop with AMD Turion™ II Dual-Core Mobile Processor 6-cell lithium-ion battery AC power adapter Software: Microsoft Works; Cyberlink DVD Suite; Adobe Acrobat Reader and more HP Mobile remote Owner's manual Product Features VISION Technology Premium by AMD For every detail to jump right off the screen when you're viewing high-definition movies and videos, playing games, converting MP3 tracks or video chatting online. AMD Turion™ II dual-core mobile processor M500* Features 2 processing cores, 1MB L2 cache and 2.2GHz processor speed per core. 6GB DDR2 DIMM memory For multitasking power, expandable to 8GB. Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support Records up to 8.5GB of data or 4 hours of video using compatible DVD+R DL and DVD-R DL media; also supports LightScribe direct-disc labels using compatible LightScribe media. 15.6" LED high-definition widescreen display With BrightView technology and 1366 x 768 resolution showcases movies and games in stunning clarity. 320GB Serial ATA hard drive (7200 rpm) Offers spacious storage and fast read/write times. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 graphics Features up to 3070MB total graphics memory for lush images. HDMI output for connecting to an HDTV. Altec Lansing audio with SRS Premium Sound. HP Mobile remote For easy control over media. Built-in webcam with digital microphone Makes it easy to chat with and send video mail to family and friends. 5-in-1 digital media reader Supports Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO and xD-Picture Card formats. 3 high-speed USB 2.0 ports For fast digital video, audio and data transfer. 1 eSATA/USB combo port. Built-in wireless LAN (802.11b/g) Connect to the Internet without wires. Built-in 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN With RJ-45 connector and 56 Kbps modem for flexible wired Web connectivity options. Weighs 6.5 lbs. and measures just 1.6" thin For portable power. Long battery life Of up to 4 hours and 15 minutes to give you more time away from an outlet. HP Espresso Imprint finish For a stylish look. Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit operating system preinstalled Provides a stable computing platform. Software package included With Microsoft Works, Cyberlink DVD Suite, Adobe Acrobat Reader and more. 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 also included. ENERGY STAR qualified Designed to use less energy and meets strict energy efficiency guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy. AMD, AMD Arrow logo, AMD Turion, AMD PowerNow!, HyperTransport and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. *Model number indicates relative mobility and performance among this AMD processor class. **AMD's Enhanced Virus Protection provides additional protection against buffer overflow viruses. AMD and its partners strongly recommend you continue to use third-party anti-virus software as part of your total security solution. OR HP - Pavilion Laptop with Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor - What's Included HP Pavilion Laptop with Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor 6-cell lithium-ion battery AC adapter, power cord/cable Software: Microsoft Works; Cyberlink DVD Suite; Adobe Acrobat Reader and more HP mobile remote Owner's manual Product Features Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T6600 Features 2 processing cores, 800MHz frontside bus, 2MB L2 cache and 2.2GHz processor speed per core. 2 high-performance processing cores To run multiple demanding applications simultaneously without hesitation. 4GB DDR3 memory For multitasking power, expandable to 8GB. Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support Create custom DVDs; also supports LightScribe direct-disc labels using compatible LightScribe media. 15.6" high-definition widescreen display With LED BrightView technology and 1366 x 768 resolution showcases movies and games in stunning clarity. 500GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm) Offers spacious storage and fast read/write times. Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD Features up to 1695MB total video memory for intense detail. Built-in webcam with microphone Makes it easy to chat with and send video mail to family and friends. 5-in-1 media reader Supports Secure Digital, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard and xD-Picture Card. 3 high-speed USB 2.0 ports For fast digital video, audio and data transfer. 1 eSATA/USB combo port. Built-in high-speed wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n) Connect to the Internet without wires. Built-in 10/100Base-T Ethernet LAN With RJ-45 connector for quick and easy wired Web connection. Weighs 6.3 lbs. and measures just 1.6" thin i couldnt put the rest of the list on there but you get the idea of what its suppose to be. please help im buying it tomorrow thanks!

He didn't call me last night, is he with someone else? Interested in me still? He wrote me: First of all Im very very sorry about last night!I was in a club a bit far away with my friends & i didn t recognize it was so late...i went back home at1:30!and i saw your message online...i felt very bad!im so sorry!can u forgive me??i would have sent u a sms while i was coming back(walking, that s why it took me such a long time)!This week s gonna be messy for me cause i must study info for doing a big assignment due next monday!but i also have other assignments and champions league final(wednesday night-thursady morning)!sob im in a hurry and i really dont know how to figure info out! I wish u were here to help me just with your presence and support!!How s your work doing?busy day? Tonight I finish uni at 9 but then i probably have to meet my classmate to do info!ill let u know if im not going sending u an email on your mobile!if u r going to gym, have fun!im very happy u r doing something u like so much!1000kisses honey and 1000apologies!!take care my petit bon bon He is my on-line pal...who has started showing his interest and told me that he wants to consider something serious with me in future. We have already decided to meet up in Australia and do travelling together. Since we have booked tickets, he seems always busy, or tired... At the weekend, he goes clubbing with friends... He texts me everyday...and the night before he toldme that he wants to see my face on webcam and needs a chat to feel close to me, so we set a time, but he was not there yesterday.... Shall I trust him, or cancel the trip? We have initially decided to take things slowly but it is hard when he flirts me. We usually have communication everyday... sometimes 9hrs on web-cam chat all through the night. I do not send a text message over and over. one at time.

Did you know the Republicans now have a health care reform plan? What are your thoughts? Some highlights include: Of couse limitations on malpractice lawsuits. ( got to look out for the insureance companies) "Pools" of insurance. It would let states, small businesses and others group together to offer lower-cost, health care plans. Such pools would have to offer, at a minimum, any coverage that is provided in a majority of states. Medicaid transfer. It would allow Medicaid users to take the value of their Medicaid benefits and transfer/apply those to a private health care plan instead. Boosting of health care savings accounts. It would increase incentives for people, especially those in lower income brackets or over 55, to build up HSAs. Automatic insurance. It would encourage employers to sign up their workers for health insurance automatically, so that employees would have to "opt out" of coverage if they didn't want it. This Republican alternative bill also contains several health care ideas that are increasingly championed by both parties. Longer coverage for youths. It would allow dependent children to stay on their parents' policies until they are 25. Promotion of wellness at the workplace. It would encourage employers to reward employees for improved health. Expansion of community health centers. Mobile health care. It would allow Americans to maintain their specific health insurance policies when they lose or leave jobs. In-home care. It would provide financial help and encourage more in-home care over institutions.

Will my computer be able to run Champions Online? Lifestyle: Business Entertainment Home & Student Operating Systems: Windows Vista Home Premium Startup Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® Vista Home Premium Platform: PC Orientations Allowed: Vertical Form Factor: Small Form Factor (SFF) Bays: 1 - 5.25" Drive Bay Internal Bays: 1 - 3.5" Drive Bay Available 3.5" Drive Bays: 0 Available 5.25" Drive Bays: 0 PCI Slots (Total): 1 PCI Slots (Available): 1 PCI Express X1 Slots (Total): 1 PCI Express X1 Slots (Available): 0 PS/2 Keyboard Connectors: 1 PS/2 Mouse Connectors: 1 Serial Communication Ports: 0 Parallel Ports: 0 USB Ports: 7 eSATA Ports: 1 LAN Ports: 1 Audio Out Jacks: 5 Microphone Jacks: 1 VGA Ports: 1 HDMI Ports: 1 Processor Brand: AMD Processor Class: Athlon 64 Processor Number: LE-1620 Processor Speed: 2.40GHz Processors Supported: 1 Processors Onboard: 1 Memory Type: DDR2 Memory Size: 2 x 1GB Total Memory: 2.0GB Memory Slots (Total): 2 Memory Slots (Available): 0 Maximum Memory Supported: 4.0GB Hard Drives Included: 1 Hard Drive Types: Hard Disk Drive Interface: SATA II Capacity: 160GB Speed: 7,200RPM Optical Drives Included: 1 Optical Drive Type: 18x DVD±RW SuperMulti dual-layer w/ Labelflash Optical Drive Class: DVD±RW DL Supplemental Media Type: Media Reader Capacity: 13-in-1 Media Types: MultiMediaCard Memory Stick Secure Digital Memory Stick Duo Memory Stick PRO Duo Memory Stick PRO xD Compact Flash II Compact Flash I RSMMC MMC Mobile CF+ MicroDrive mini-SD Audio Description: Integrated Audio Channels: 6-channel (5.1) high-definition Graphics Description: Integrated Graphics GPU/VPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8200 Video Memory: Up to 256MB of shared video memory Video Interface: HDMI VGA Communications Description: Integrated LAN Support 56Kbps PCI Express X1 Modem Interface Type: RJ-45 - Ethernet Connector RJ-11 - Phone Connector Data Transfer Rate: up to 56Kbps 10/100/1000Mbps Protocols: V.92 Mouse Type: Wheel Buttons: 2 Scrolling Capability: Vertical Connection Type: PS/2 Power Source: PS/2 Connection Keyboard Type: Standard Connection Type: PS/2 Power Source: PS/2 Connection Connections: USB Powered Front Speakers: 2 Height: 10.7" Width: 4.2" Depth: 15"

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

Part 2 of my 'ideal school' essay.? The first part of my essay is at http://malaysia.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Atd_dpzCQ7BhxJo3S4t_Qry4QAx.;_ylv=3?qid=20090403203146AAExrJ4 Students are required to spend 2 hours a day in study rooms, keeping quiet at all times. Flying paper planes roam the sky in here. Mobile phones, music players, alcohol, cigarettes and drugs are prohibited. Any students caught for a minor offense is given a stern warning and demerit points, moderate ones given caning whereas a heavy offense is punished either by wearing a hot dog suit singing numa numa everyday for a week or fighting in a gladiator style match with a crazed robot trying to set him on fire, which was another project gone wrong, with a gun and try to survive on his Gunkata skills. Students are split into the boys and girls dormitories with 4 students sleeping in one room with an attached toilet. Students are not allowed to enter the dormitory of the other gender. Students are not allowed to spend more than 15 minutes in the shower due to reports of facial treatments or spa sessions in the bathroom or singing in it due to the fact a poor singer’s song was mistaken for a fire siren and everyone panicked, running out of the school calling the fire brigade. The student had a lot to explain about causing the false alarm. Exams are held twice a year for all subjects. Students must also complete projects given to them where 20 points will go into the final result. All exams are answered by hand. Students are only allowed to bring a pen, a pencil, a ruler, an eraser, correction liquid and an extra tube of ink into the examination hall. All results are final and are sent to the Ministry of Education for filing. Anyone caught cheating is given 0 marks in his exam paper and a warning letter. Any student trying to place a charm on the teacher with a wand to give him/her full marks is sent to Hogwarts Academy of Magic. Students are encouraged to broaden their view on life, which has created school elections for various posts. The post of school president, vice president, several minister posts and 25 council seats are contested. Several political parties dominate the scene, the Popular Guys Party, which encourages people to be cool, the Popular Girls Party, who chase after the popular guys and also the Angry Nerds Party, which advocates cruel torture on their bullying popular guys. The Angry Nerds Party Headquarters is filled with weapons and the passageways are filled with booby traps. Members are trained in martial arts. The winner of last year’s election was the moderate Peace Party, winning the presidency, 3 out of 5 minister posts and 16 council seats. The Peace Party is a group of people who advocate peace between the two extreme sides, something not everyone takes kindly. Sports is given great emphasis, and numerous sports teams exist, like the Football team, Basketball team, Volleyball team, Tennis team, Pretend Warfare team and recently the Quidditch team. The Morgan Aniston Secondary Boarding School Quidditch team is among the best, although heavy injuries are sustained falling 50 feet straight down and players complain of painful bottoms after sitting on a flying broom for 2 hours. Nevertheless, the Quidditch, Basketball and Pretend Warfare team have won the inter-school championship at least once in the last 5 years, the Pretend Warfare team, using click pistols and rifles with 20 players in a team winning 3 years in a row due to their great skill in Gunkata, inflicting disproportionate casualties on rival teams. Holidays run from July to September with 3 weeks holiday for Christmas. There is a Year-end feast for all students on the last day of school and students are allowed to do anything they want within boundaries. A mad frenzy for the computer room and hair salon creates many champions runners from this school as there are limited facilities for 2000 students. Wrestling and kung fu fights are common. The arms locker was broken open one year, causing desperate Gunkata matches among students to save their lives, incidentally improving their skills, reflexes and agility. Parents come to take their children home and tearful farewells are said among friends, waiting for the day they will meet again. Despite its quirks and eccentricities, this is my ideal school, Morgan Aniston Secondary Boarding School. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” – Albert Einstein