Bonin, a producer for “60 Minutes,” knows what it is to be Chalabi-ed. During the build-up to the Iraq War, he and Lesley Stahl did a report featuring an interview with an Iraqi defector who claimed to have personally purchased refrigerated trucks to serve as Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs. Bonin checked those claims with “a senior UN official who had detailed knowledge of Saddam’s WMD program,” and was told they were “credible.” The defector turned out to be fabricating. The person who delivered up this man and other bogus informants to American officials and journalists was Ahmad Chalabi.

This isn’t the first book about Chalabi (Aram Roston’s well-received “The Man Who Pushed America to War” came out in 2008), and you can see why; he is a terrific character, worthy of John Le Carre or Graham Greene. To read “Arrows of the Night” — an account, studded with juicy quotes, that perfectly balances information and narrative, supplying just enough background to make each participant’s motives clear without lapsing into wonkiness — is to feel strangely torn. It’s appalling to contemplate the real-world consequences, for both Americans and Iraqis, of Chalabi’s quest to replace Saddam as the leader of Iraq, but it’s also difficult to escape the gravitational pull of his story.

Chalabi is, in many respects, exactly the sort of guy people root for in books and hokey Hollywood movies: an underdog seeking to free his beloved homeland from a tyrant, as wily as Odysseus, as resourceful as Tom Sawyer, as determined as the Count of Monte Cristo. He did it for his father, a proud man brought low and cast into exile by the Baath Party coup of 1968 and he did it for his people, who were truly suffering. He followed his dream! He never gave up! The magnetic qualities of Chalabi and his story make for an account of the Iraq War that reads like a spy novel. If only the blood weren’t real.

Living in opulence before the coup (Ahmad’s father once gave him a swimming pool as a birthday present), Chalabi’s family nevertheless identified with Iraq’s downtrodden Shia majority; Ahmad’s quest for personal power was always wrapped in a notion of retributive justice for his co-religionists. Highly intelligent and cultured, and possessed of legendary charm, Chalabi employed a strategy for achieving his goals that had benefited his clan for generations. This involved, as Bonin puts it, “identifying centers of power and then ingratiating himself with them or insinuating himself into their good graces.”

He did it at boarding school in England. He did it as a young man in Jordan, running the Petra Bank and extending handsome loans to members of the royal family. He did it with the CIA, persuading the agency to back the Iraqi National Congress (a self-styled “government in exile”) in setting up an outpost in Northern Iraq. He did it in Washington, D.C., securing powerful protectors among the neoconservative players of the George W. Bush administration and feeding information to national journalists. And he did it in Tehran, winning over an influential ayatollah by imploring, “Your eminence, what I want is that you join us in fighting Saddam with the arrows of the night” — a reference to the Shia notion of the specially blessed piety of the oppressed.

With the (possible) exception of the boarding school, all of these associations ended in disgrace, betrayal and recrimination. The overextended Petra Bank went belly up and Chalabi had to flee across the border in the trunk of a friend’s car. (He was convicted in absentia of fraud and other crimes.) His overly ambitious military shenanigans in Northern Iraq almost pushed the U.S. into a regional war and earned him the undying enmity of the CIA and the State Department. True, his ingenious ability to play on the intellectual hubris and imperial ambitions of the neocons did succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein from power, but when Chalabi arrived in Baghdad, expecting to reap a position as Iraq’s leader, his lack of any popular following made that impossible. Even Iran ultimately decided he was too secular for their plans.

Still, “never has anyone parlayed such a weak hand into such a momentous outcome as he,” Bonin writes, and it’s fascinating to see how Chalabi did it. He understood American politics better than most Americans, succeeding at getting what he wanted even when huge swaths of the policy establishment regarded him as a rank con man. When it was discovered that he’d leaked crucial information to the Iranians in postwar Iraq, and George W. Bush demanded that he be cut loose, Chalabi’s supporters in the Pentagon (Paul Wolfowitz was especially zealous) even tried to stonewall their own boss. “Backing Chalabi was even more important to them than following the direct orders of the president of the United States,” marvels one CIA staffer.

But if Chalabi is devious, Bonin does not hesitate to point out that he was far from alone in that. Chalabi granted Bonin over 60 hours of interviews, and while it’s hard to imagine he’ll be pleased by the results, “Arrows of the Night” does show how things looked from the Iraqi exile’s perspective. Almost everyone Chalabi double-crossed — from the CIA to the Bush administration — was also planning to use and discard him. “He did not view his cause as subordinate to that of the United States,” Bonin explains when recounting one early scheme, “and he certainly didn’t consider himself a CIA asset. To the contrary, ‘I saw them as an asset that I could use to promote my program.’” And as far as he was concerned, his motives with regard to Iraq were far more admirable than those of the Americans.

Unfortunately for Chalabi, the one entity he never succeeded in winning over was the Iraqi people. He “may have done more than any other Iraqi to rid the country of Saddam Hussein,” Bonin writes, but he failed every electoral test thereafter. In 2004, a poll found him to be Iraq’s “least-trusted public figure.” Whatever his skills in mesmerizing the rich, powerful and influential, Chalabi lacks the common touch.

It’s not hard to see why. This is a man who counts among the great traumas of his childhood the sight of his father making rice. The horror! Today, living in a walled compound in an affluent Baghdad neighborhood, Chalabi retains servants to hold his cellphone and eyeglasses when he’s not using them, and enjoys the energy supplied by “three massive generators” while the city’s other residents have only a few hours of electricity and running water per day. (Bonin describes this setup as “Chalabi in full pasha mode.”)

So much for the scrappy underdog. Perhaps history, as Bonin remarks, has finally passed Chalabi by, leaving him to savor a “victory” for the Iraqi people that leaves him permanently sidelined. Then again, there’s that unnamed CIA official, quoted by Bonin, who warns, “Until you put a bullet through the man’s heart, don’t count Ahmad Chalabi out. He will always come back.”

The grandiloquent post in question requests either (it’s not entirely clear) that Israelis feed Shalit’s captors to sharks or that they feed his captors along with women and “their offspring” to sharks. (I imagine Abrams considers nearly every Palestinian in Gaza to be complicit in Shalit’s imprisonment, so this distinction may not amount to much.) Either way, the post makes liberal usage of unambiguous anti-Arab slurs (“devils’ spawn,” “savages,” “animals”) and, well, it’s a call for mass slaughter.

After various people, including Max Blumenthal, said it was perhaps inappropriate for a Washington Post blogger to endorse this sort of talk, Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton took the case. Pexton concluded that the retweet was in poor taste, but for him it was more of an issue of inappropriate Twitter usage than it was of Rubin being essentially an awful person who agrees with a virulent anti-Arab bigot.

To demonstrate that she essentially agrees with Abrams’ perspective, Rubin then tweeted a link to another Abrams post, calling it “chilling, sobering, eloquent.” This post puts the word “Palestinians” in scare quotes and places Mahmoud Abbas in a list of “blood-worshippers.”

Who is Rachel Abrams, besides a woman who writes like a teenager imitating Marty Peretz? She’s another talentless hack born into neocon royalty. Abrams is the daughter of Midge Decter, and apparently inherited her mother’s obsessive homophobia. Her stepfather is neoconservative founding father Norman Podhoretz, and she is married to Bush administration Middle East honcho Elliot Abrams. An intense hatred of Arabs is basically the one theme of her writings, repeated endlessly, in an infinite number of variations.

Here, for example, she tells the inspiring tale of literally screaming “Fuck you, Arabs” while driving past the Israeli West Bank barrier wall. This isn’t someone making any sort of controversial political argument. This is just someone who hates, intensely, a specific ethnic group.

So, with the ombudsman having weighed in more or less on the side of it being a bad idea for Jennifer Rubin to endorse this woman, we come to editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who had this to say:

As a general matter I think it isn’t wise for me to comment on the work of the ombudsman, who is entitled to his views, and over whom I do not have editorial control.

However, I will say this: I think Jennifer is an excellent journalist and a relentless reporter. I think because she has strong views, and because she is as willing to take on her home team, as it were, as the visitors, she comes under more scrutiny than many and is often the target of unjustified criticism. I think she brings enormous value to the Post.

Yeah, Fred, people aren’t criticizing her for “strong views,” they’re criticizing her for endorsing what looks to be eliminationist anti-Arab rhetoric from a bigoted psycho.

In Hiatt’s world, “hating Arabs” is just a controversial opinion that “brings enormous value to the Post.” As Blumenthal says, if Rubin had supported a blog post with the exact same tone written about black people — or Jews! — she’d be out of job right now. Instead, she’s an “excellent journalist,” according to her boss.

That’s the state of the liberal media today.

Some Republican political appointees are representatives of the interests of various GOP-supporting major industries. Others, like Bolton or Michael Brown, are just hacks who are brought in to demonstrate the unimportance and uselessness of whatever position they are supposed to be filling. The message is, a trained chimp — or a right-wing ideologue — could do this government job.

In order to express his contempt for the institution of the United Nations, President George W. Bush revoked the ambassador to the U.N.’s Cabinet rank and then gave the job (with a recess appointment) to Bolton, the world’s angriest mustache. Bolton has so little respect for the U.N. that he refuses to even admit that it exists. (He also supports the removal of ten stories from the U.N. building. Despite this, he is on no terrorist watch lists that I know of.)

He is best known, among people who don’t spend their spare time endlessly rescreening Pamela Geller’s TV appearances on YouTube, as the guy who once angrily hurled a stapler at an underling’s head, just one of many examples of his incredibly unprofessional behavior.

He eventually turned out to be too much of a right-wing true believer for even the Bush administration, and by the end of Bush’s second term, Bolton and his ousted neo-con allies were sniping at their president in the press. “I don’t consider Bolton credible,” Bush said, which probably caused Bolton to contort his mustache into a comical frowny shape. (What was the president’s first hint that his U.N. ambassador wasn’t credible? His creepy, flirty relationship with Pamela Geller?)

So, in short, John Bolton is not a credible candidate for anything, at all. He may even be too far gone at this point to score another State Department job in a future Republican administration. He is now and forevermore a creature of right-wing think tanks and Fox News analysis. There’s no good reason for Politico to take his presidential fantasies seriously. Like, for example, here is a sentence that they should’ve probably reconsidered: “Despite his claims that a potential candidacy would not be a niche affair, Bolton is well-positioned to take advantage of the dearth of foreign policy experience currently in the 2012 field.” Writing that does not make it true. The power of positive thinking will not create viable presidential candidates out of Bush-era laughingstocks.

(In case you are curious, John Bolton’s other issue is abolishing Medicare, because of the deficit.)

It soon became clear that I did not understand my own country. In a remarkably short period of time, the right managed to persuade the American people to think of jihadist terrorism as war, not crime. Al-Qaida’s transnational network of militants, and the imitators it inspired, was treated as though they were the equivalents of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Instead of being treated as the equivalent of the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, bin Laden was promoted to the status of Hitler or Stalin.

The campaign to defend America and its allies against al-Qaida was a war. A Long War. A Global War on Terror. Or, on the theory that the Cold War was World War III, World War IV.

Nobody pushed the terrorism-as-war theme more than the neoconservatives. CNN reported in April 2003:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey said Wednesday the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.

In the address to a group of college students, Woolsey described the Cold War as the third world war and said “This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War.”

He said the new war is actually against three enemies: the religious rulers of Iran, the “fascists” of Iraq and Syria, and Islamic extremists like al Qaeda.

As late as 2007, after American public opinion had turned against the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, the flagship neoconservative magazine, published “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.” Podhoretz argued that the U.S. probably should be fighting even more wars on even more fronts at the same time:

Consider: the campaign against al Qaeda required us to topple the Taliban regime, and we may willy-nilly find ourselves forced by the same political and military logic to topple five or six or seven more tyrannies in the Islamic world (including that other sponsor of terrorism, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority). I can even go along with David Pryce-Jones in imagining the turmoil of this war leading to some new species of an imperial mission for America, whose purpose would be to oversee the emergence of successor governments in the region more amenable to reform and modernization than the despotisms now in place. Like Pryce-Jones, I can also envisage the establishment of some kind of American protectorate over the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, as we more and more come to wonder why 7,000 princes should go on being permitted to exert so much leverage over us and everyone else.

I still do not understand why the American elite and the American people went along with the efforts of the neocons to blow the necessary campaign against al-Qaida into a Thirty Years’ or Hundred Years’ War against “Islamofascism” or “Islamism,” a catch-all category that includes secular Baathists and Iranian Shia theocrats who despise Sunni religious militants like bin Laden and are despised by them in turn. But I understand the appeal of the World War IV theme to neoconservatives all too well, because two decades ago I was one of them.

In the 1980s, I was what was known as a Cold War liberal. I identified with former Kennedy-Johnson liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, who in my view were defending the New Deal tradition against the reactionary right and the radical left. When the Cold War ended, I sided with the neocons like Moynihan who thought the U.S. should scale back its foreign policy commitments, reform the culture of unnecessary secrecy without endangering legitimate secrets, and focus on neglected domestic priorities. This approach was compatible with the version of foreign policy realism promoted by the National Interest, the journal where I worked as executive editor with editor Owen Harries.

The National Interest was the sister publication of the Public Interest, the leading neoconservative public policy quarterly. Both were published by “the godfather of neoconservatism,” the late Irving Kristol. Kristol was more sympathetic to realpolitik than most neoconservatives. Even so, I grew increasingly less comfortable as the neocons in the early 1990s expanded their alliance with the religious right, originally an alliance of convenience based on support for the right wing in Israel, into a “culture war” against liberalism as such.

I remember the day in early 1993 when I ceased thinking of myself as a neoconservative, even of a moderate kind, and started looking seriously for another movement and another job. Irving had returned from a conference in Germany and was asking Owen Harries and me whether we would be interested in publishing a talk he had given. The essay, published in the National Interest, was titled “My Cold War.”

In the essay, Irving confessed that he had never really been interested in defeating the Soviet Union. The real enemy had been American liberalism, all along: 

There is no “after the Cold War” for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers. We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. Now that the other “Cold War” is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case with our victorious war against a global communist threat. We are, I sometimes feel, starting from ground zero, and it is a conflict I shall be passing on to my children and grandchildren. But it is a far more interesting cold war — intellectually interesting, spiritually interesting — than the war we have so recently won, and I rather envy those young enough for the opportunities they will have to participate in it.

There are a few people on the American right who are interested in foreign policy for its own sake. But the majority of conservative pundits who write or talk about foreign policy, like Irving Kristol, are mainly interested in smearing Americans who disagree them with them as Fifth Columnists, traitors who are undermining America or Western Civilization or Democracy or whatever from within. Liberals are Enemies Within, in conscious or unconscious alliance with the Enemies Without.

That’s where World War IV came in, after 9/11. In order for the neocons and other conservatives to accuse American liberals of being fifth columnists, there had to be an external enemy outside America’s borders with four other columns. Unfortunately for the right, Gorbachev had, to use his phrase, deprived America of an enemy.

The end of the Cold War deprived the American right of an external enemy that it could use in guilt-by-association campaigns to smear fellow citizens who disagree with it on a variety of issues, foreign and domestic. In hindsight, it now seems clear to me that the post-1945 right was and is essentially McCarthyist. In the late 1940s and early 1950s there was a Soviet threat to the U.S. and its allies, and communist espionage in the U.S. was a genuine but limited problem. But McCarthy and his followers were interested in power politics or communism only to the extent that they could go after their real enemies, liberals and moderate conservatives. (Liberals themselves have succumbed to the temptation; during World War II, there was an equally unprincipled “Brown Scare” attempting to link various American conservatives and isolationists unjustly with Hitler and the Axis.)

9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism. And the idea of World War IV enabled the right once again to smear American liberals as defeatists or appeasers, if not traitors, in a struggle on the scale of the world wars and the Cold War.

Central to the rhetoric of American rightists, be they literate neocons or populist wingnuts like Glenn Beck, is the accusation that America is on the verge of destruction by powerful enemies without and traitorous or defeatist progressives within. In this political psychodrama, the identity of the foreign threat is secondary. If terrorists identifying themselves with Peru’s Sendero Luminoso had massacred Americans on 9/11, conservatives might well have declared war on “Latinofascism,” called for the invasion of Cuba, Venezuela and other leftist Latin American regimes, and denounced cultural relativism and multiculturalism and the welfare state for weakening the will of Americans to resist the imminent overthrow of Western civilization by Latin American Maoism.

World War IV was never really about bin Laden or al-Qaida. It was always about American domestic politics. Whether or not al-Qaida fades away after the death of bin Laden, the right will continue to wage its American civil war, using World War IV as an excuse. Or maybe World War V or World War VI. Whatever.

Some very nice Mitch Daniels fans emailed me to say that I was wrong, and that Republicans would not care about Daniels’ background once they examined his record. (Of course the other problem with Mitch Daniels as a presidential candidate is that he is the sort of person who is only interesting if you care about “records.”)

Commentary answers my point directly today. His heritage is totally not a big deal!

Nobody, especially not neoconservatives who have been loudly championing the cause of freedom in the Arab world, has anything against Daniels’s heritage. Nor, despite the fervent efforts of some to promote the myth that there has been a post 9-11 backlash against Muslims in this country, do many other Americans care about his origins.

Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin even says that Daniels “seems like the perfect candidate” on “economic issues.” So, problem solved!

But… Tobin still has some issues with Governor Daniels. It’s not his Arab heritage — it’s that he is “something of a blank slate” on foreign policy. Tobin’s not insinuating anything about him, he’s just saying “blank slate.” On “foreign policy.”

See, the problem is not that Daniels himself is of Arab heritage. The problem is that he pals around with other Arabs:

Thus the news that Daniels is accepting an award from the Arab American Institute (AAI) is more than a little curious. The AAI is a left-leaning organization founded by onetime Democratic Party activist James Zogby. Although it is far more respectable than terrorist front groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), it has also been among the most consistent voices downplaying the threat from Islamist terror and opposing American efforts to fight back against Islamist enemies of freedom. And needless to say, like Zogby, it is no friend to the State of Israel.

Of course, Tobin eventually notes that despite his claim that Daniels is a “blank slate,” Daniels has actually already received an award from the Anti-Defamation League. In other words, even though Daniels is a known ally of Israel and friend of the Jewish State, it is still suspicious that he is willing to be honored by a liberal Arab organization. A liberal Arab group with the wrong position on “foreign policy” (Israel), no less.

“Perhaps the group is unaware that Daniels is outspoken in his defense of the Jewish State,” Tobin writes. Perhaps the first half of Tobin’s post is similarly unaware of that fact!

I can’t understand at all why any liberals would ever suggest that conservatives treat American Arabs and Muslims as guilty until proven patriotic.