My lat­est for IraqS­log­ger is up, and there’s a howler of an op-ed in today’s _Wall Street Journal_. As I wrote for the Slogger:

Melik Kay­lan writes a fawn­ing piece on Ahmad Cha­l­abi for the _Wall Street Journal_’s op-ed page, call­ing him the “near­est thing Iraqis cur­rently pos­sess to a gen­uine walk-and-talk demo­c­ra­tic politi­cian.” For many Amer­i­cans, that may be hard to stom­ach, as the guy has been roundly crit­i­cized for ped­dling false WMD infor­ma­tion to eager lis­ten­ers at the Pen­ta­gon. (He once said, “As far as we’re con­cerned we’ve been entirely suc­cess­ful. That tyrant Sad­dam is gone and the Amer­i­cans are in Bagh­dad. What was said before is not impor­tant. … We are heroes in error.”) In Chalabi’s views, every­thing would have been hunky-dory in Bagh­dad if the Amer­i­cans had just let the Iraqis run the show, pre­sum­ably with him in charge. (Which was pretty much the plan until those med­dlin’ State Depart­ment kids showed up.) Fur­ther­more, with­out once men­tion­ing that Cha­l­abi is Shi’ite him­self, Kay­lan says Cha­l­abi rec­og­nizes the real­i­ties of Iraq and its eth­nic makeup, admit­ting that Shi’ites will be dom­i­nant. Well, other than Sunni insur­gents, does any­one really dis­pute that? Kay­lan seems to have been snook­ered by Cha­l­abi, who thrills Iraqis by wan­der­ing amongst the peo­ple. Admirable yes, but Cha­l­abi has almost zero sup­port in Iraq and per­haps the rea­son he’s able to walk and talk rel­a­tively safely in pub­lic is because no one takes him seri­ously anymore.

The quote from Cha­l­abi that I ref­er­ence can be found here, way back from Feb­ru­ary 2004.