Iraq's comeback kid: Chalabi keeps his eyes on the prize.(AT WAR II)(Ahmed Chalabi)

ON November 8, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi arrived in Washington for an eight-day visit. His agenda included meetings with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and national security adviser Stephen Hadley. To many pundits, Chalabi's visit marks a change in fortune for an Iraqi politician not long ago dismissed as irrelevant by diplomats and intelligence officials alike.

Disdain for Chalabi runs deep in the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Central Command. As an advocate of both regime change and democratization, he became a lightning rod for criticism among proponents of the status quo.

Both before and after Iraq's liberation, State Department officials criticized Chalabi as an exile with little connection to his own country. CIA analysts seconded such pronouncements. On September 6, 2004, for example, Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst now at the National Defense University, told the Associated Press that "over the years, [CIA favorite Ayad] Allawi's contacts were proven to be real while Chalabi's were never what Chalabi told us." Former Defense Intelligence Agency official W. Patrick Lang described Chalabi as "basically an emigre politician" and told an Australian radio station that the CIA and State Department "didn't trust what he said [and] didn't think he understood Iraq, really." General Anthony Zinni, head of U.S. Central Command, belittled Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress as "some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London."

But, in the months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Chalabi returned to Iraq. And after liberation, he became an irritant to Washington policymakers. While Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer sought to run Iraq by diktat, Chalabi agitated for direct elections and restoration of Iraqi sovereignty. He clashed with Meghan O'Sullivan, now deputy national security adviser for Iraq, when she worked to undermine and eventually reverse de-Baathification. He undercut White House attempts to internationalize responsibility for Iraq in the months prior to the 2004 U.S. elections when his Governing Council auditing commission began to investigate the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal.

In a West Wing meeting, then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice called Chalabi's opposition to the ill-fated Fallujah Brigade "unhelpful." Soon afterward, she directed her staff to outline ways to "marginalize" Chalabi. There followed espionage and counterfeiting charges-the former never seriously pursued by the FBI and the latter thrown out of an Iraqi court. Following the June 28, 2004, transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, John Negroponte--then U.S. ambassador to Iraq and now the director of national intelligence--refused to meet Chalabi. Cut off from U.S. patronage and without any serious Iraqi base, the analysts said, Chalabi would fade away.

He did not. Nor has he simply reinvented himself, as a State Department official suggested following Chalabi's November 9 address at the American Enterprise Institute. Rather, his relevance has remained constant. Unlike those of other Iraqi figures embraced by various bureaucracies in Washington, Chalabi's fortunes have not depended on U.S. patronage. His survival--and, indeed, his recent ascent against the obstacles thrown in his path by Washington--underlines the failures of diplomats and intelligence analysts to put aside departmental agendas to provide the White House with an objective and accurate analysis of the sources of legitimacy inside Iraq.

While the CIA has politicized its intelligence products to support its own proxies, its analytical failures go beyond institutional axe-grinding. Most analysts are in their 20s and 30s; recruited fresh out of college or graduate school, few have significant experience in the countries to which they are assigned. Security officers look with suspicion on anyone with too many foreign contacts and too much time spent in adversarial countries. While many CIA analysts gain book knowledge of their subjects, they lack cultural understanding. They study politicians, but have no sense of personalities. Too often, their products reflect mirror-imaging of the analysts' own thought-processes into their subjects. Cultural equivalence, too, pollutes analysis: Family may be important to Americans and Iraqis alike, but it means much more for Iraqis. To Americans, genealogy is a hobby. To Iraqis, it is honor.