Call me paranoid, or obsessive, but I never count Ahmed Chalabi out. His recent (some might call it triumphal) visit to Washington seemed to patch up relations with the more skeptical among the Bush administration’s leading lights, and it certainly won him the renewed plaudits of the neocon chattering classes. Which brings us to Chalabi’s future.

The Wall Street Journal, the Chalabi-loving pulpit extraordinaire, manages in today’s editorial to pimp once again for the bulbous charlatan. In an editorial on the election in Iraq called “Mission (Partly) Accomplished,” it says that the religious Shiites and Iyad Allawi, the secular former Baathist, may offset each other. “This could open the way for Ahmed Chalabi—who ran his own candidate list and has demonstrated competence as energy minister—to form a government.”

Note in passing that Slate, the on line mag, has decided to carry a column by Tamara Chalabi, Ahmed’s daughter. Exactly why has to be left to the geniuses over there, but it has already drawn fire from Salon, its rival.

An interesting comment on Chalabi’s prospects comes from the Financial Times, in a piece by Guy Dinmore, Holly Yeager, and others:

Although the Bush administration insists it is strictly neutral, officials concede that there is a general hope that one of the main secular politicians, such as Iyad Allawi, the former provisional prime minister, or his rival Ahmad Chalabi, will negotiate their way into the prime minister's office. Analysts say Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will play an active role in helping the disparate Iraqi parties form a broad-based coalition after the polls.

Now, the thing is, since 2002 the Bush administration has been divided between the neocons at the Pentagon and the Office of the VP, who back Chalabi, and the more realist elements at the CIA and State Department, who back Allawi. (In the past, the Cold War between those elements and their respective cats-paws in Iraq turned hot, in Iraq at least.) So the question raised by the FT analysis, which is “spot on,” as the British say, is who, precisely, will Kingmaker Zal Khalilzad support?

Chalabi’s main attraction for Iraqis, slim though it is, is that he can act as a conduit for American support and American money, given the slavishness of his fealty to the Bush administration. Here’s a quote from today’s Toronto Star reflecting that appeal by an Iraqi “clothing merchant”:

Wathik Ali, 38, a clothing merchant, told the Toronto Star he voted for Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile whose Iraqi National Congress provided some of the faulty intelligence data upon which the White House based its decision to invade.

"Chalabi did a favour for us by helping liberate Iraq from dictatorship and he has big economic relations that reflect the possibility of big investments," said Ali. "Besides, the Americans don't like the Islamists ... And the Americans are the force on the ground, so it's better to elect this guy."

Chalabi spent the election campaign blasting Allawi for corruption, mismanagement and other failings. That might bring to mind images of pots calling kettles black, but in this case it’s more extreme than that, since Chalabi virtually defines corruption in politics for Iraq the way Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff do here.

Anyway, we won’t know the result of the election yesterday until sometime around New Year’s Eve, since it will take the Shiite-Kurdish coalition that runs Iraq a long time to count and re-count and re-jigger and re-analyze the votes, run the result by Khalilzad, ask Iran’s ayatollahs what they think, re-count again, etc. Those who believe that Iraq’s vote yesterday was anything remotely like a fair election probably belong in Disneyland. What I liked best were the reports that the entire Basra police department was running around with loudspeakers, utterly illegally, shouting at voters to vote for the Ayatollah Sistani-backed, Iranian-influenced Shiite religious list. Can’t wait to hear the results.