THE MAN WHO PUSHED AMERICA TO WAR

What do you get when you cross a felonious royalist bearing a long agenda and list of grudges with the world’s sole superpower? An endless war in a faraway land, that’s what.

Though NBC Nightly News correspondent Roston doesn’t quite say so, Iraqi dissident and would-be empire-builder Ahmad Chalabi is an analog to an Omega 7 anti-Castroite living in Miami but longing for glory days in Havana. Routed from Iraq when the royal government fell to a military coup, events that later would bring Saddam Hussein to power, the Chalabi family, royalists all, went into exile. “If you are trying to find ‘Rosebud,’ ” one Chalabi relative tells Roston, “look for the 1958 revolution . . . that disempowered our family.” Chalabi himself went to MIT, where he fell under the tutelage of mathematician Warren Ambrose and might have become an Iraqi analog to…well, strangely, Noam Chomsky, who traveled in similar circles. Chalabi, writes Roston, claims to have worked in cryptography there and crossed paths with federal spooks who warned him away from the research, though his classmates discount the assertion. That moment comes early on in the book, which proceeds to unfold a skein of misdirection and curious bedfellowing on the part of Chalabi, who was early on, it seems, in the employ of the Iranians, on the enemy-of-my-enemy model. Given the Iranian connection and Chalabi’s business relationships with known crooks (notably a “disbarred Florida lawyer and failed brothel owner”), why would the Bush administration—specifically, Donald Rumsfeld—have hitched its wagon to that particular star? Mostly, Roston’s account makes clear, because at least for a time Chalabi told the neocons what they wanted to hear about WMDs, terrorist connections, secret plots and so forth. Bush got a war out of the deal, while Chalabi got his longed-for countercoup.

Another tenpenny nail in the Bush administration’s coffin, insofar as the historical record is concerned.