Postscript: Ahmad Chalabi

“I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Larry Wilkerson, the chief of staff to Colin Powell, who was then the Secretary of State, told me. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he gave it to them.”

That, it seems to me, was Chalabi’s sin—helping to justify a decision that officials in the Bush Administration were inclined to make anyway.