Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller — the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

Hitchens was one of the great contemporary masters of argumentative prose. He had an unerring sense of logical structure, a maniacally precise gift for the mot juste, a huge frame of intellectual reference, and – this is what really pissed me off as a fellow toiler in the syntactical groves – a seemingly automatic ability to write transitions. He could practically do it in his sleep. A pal of mine once saw him drink an entire bottle of scotch at a dinner party, excuse himself, go upstairs, and come down 45 minutes later having filed a letter-perfect piece. At the absolute top of my game, I might briefly be able to keep up that pace on a stretch of level argumentative ground. But at the first transition, the first time a new idea loomed up like a mountain that had to be navigated around, I would be broken down in the ditch while Hitchens would be speeding off at 100 miles an hour, as debonair as James Bond.

Hitchens was not only virtuoso, he was a fearless virtuoso with a mean streak. This is a scary combination. When he attacked someone, there would not usually be a lot of them left for their next of kin to pick up. But if his combative style was his trademark, he was also capable of writing meandering, discursive, thoughtful essays, pieces driven not just by animus or the desire to dominate but carried on their own imaginative and logical momentum. There was a lot of Mencken, Swift and Orwell in Hitchens, but a little Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne as well. The man had a very large mind, and by all accounts a very large heart as well.

One large question mark hangs over Hitchens’ career. For 10 years, whenever his name comes up, people have asked the same question: Why on earth did Hitchens support the Iraq War? And why did he never recant, even after it had become obvious to all but blind ideologues that the whole thing had been a disaster?

I do not have any personal insight into these questions. I met Hitchens a few times, but did not know him. But it appears that it was precisely Hitchens’ big heart, combined with certain eccentricities of judgment peculiar to those former Marxists that Isaac Deutscher called “inverted Stalinists,” that may have led him to go ideologically off the tracks.

An insightful piece about Hitchens by Salon’s Washington bureau chief Jefferson Morley makes clear that Hitchens’ disenchantment with Marxism, and his increasingly (and ultimately problematic) tendency to see politics in deeply personal terms, were closely related. Like many former Marxists, Hitchens had grown weary of the mental contortions (aka the “dialectic”) required to justify Stalinist/Communist tyranny. Morley points out that for Hitchens, flying in the face of left-liberal orthodoxy to embrace victims of injustice, no matter who their oppressors were, became a touchstone for his own intellectual integrity and honesty. Thus, Hitchens – to the dismay of his colleagues at the Nation, but correctly in my view – agreed with Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Union was an “Evil Empire.” For Hitchens, just because the despised Reagan said something did not mean that it was wrong.

Hitchens’ insistence on taking principled stands, as in his ringing defense of his friend Salman Rushdie against the death sentence handed down by Ayatollah Khomeini, is admirable as far as it goes. The problem is that he took his principled stands to self-defeating extremes. He was so idealistic, so black and white, so Manichaean in his moral judgments, that he ended up supporting political positions antithetical to his own deeply held convictions. For the world of politics and power cannot be negotiated or defined or dealt with purely in ethical terms. It is a world of grays, of compromises, of ugly regimes that must be tolerated because the alternative is worse. Hitchens was so obsessed with moral principle that it distorted his judgment.

Hence his misguided support for the war in Iraq. On the most crucial political and moral issue of our time, Hitchens took the wrong side. His friend Tom Luddy once told me that Hitchens supported the war simply because he was passionately opposed to fascism, no matter what form it took or where it was found. No one could argue with this. Hitchens also had many Iraqi and Kurdish friends who had suffered under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, and whom he stood up for. Again, no one would argue that he was not right to do so.

But, of course, there is a world of difference between being opposed to Saddam’s fascism (and contrary to Hitchens’ specious neologism, there was nothing “Islamo” about Saddam’s fascism – he was just your garden-variety Stalinist monster) and supporting an unprovoked invasion that was likely to make things much worse.

I covered two debates between Hitchens and the journalist Mark Danner – one just before the war, one nine months after it began. In both debates Danner argued that war was too risky, while Hitchens asserted that war was both necessary and morally justified because Saddam was evil and dangerous. What was striking to me, particularly in the second debate, was both Hitchens’ moral fervor, and the weakness of his substantive arguments about the threat Saddam posed. Twice, he made flat assertions about the link between Saddam and al-Qaida-like jihadists (“There was and there is a Hitler-Stalin pact between the forces of jihad and the forces of Baathist totalitarianism”) that were simply false.

How could someone as knowledgeable as Hitchens embrace such sophistical arguments? And even if we give him a pass for supporting the war in its early days, after it turned into a bloody nightmare, why didn’t he acknowledge he had been wrong?

I suspect the answer has to do with Hitchens’ earlier Marxism. It is hard to escape the conclusion that at some level, Hitchens was indeed an “inverted Stalinist”: a former True Believer who simply transferred the rigid idealism of his old cause into an equally rigid insistence on seeing all politics as a matter of personal morality. As Ian Buruma wrote in the New York Review of Books, for Hitchens, “politics is essentially a matter of character … Politicians do bad things because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.” There is much to admire in Hitchens’ moral stance, but it led him into some corners he found himself unable or unwilling to extricate himself from.

But it would be wrong to end this appraisal there – and not just because de mortuis nil nisi bonum (a phrase Hitchens would not have had to Google, as I just did.) He may have made mistakes, as we all have, but his life and work should not be reduced to his sometime political misjudgments. In all ways, Christopher Hitchens was a force to be reckoned with. He was a powerful thinker, a courageous journalist and a superb stylist. In a monochrome world, he was a true original. Somewhere in a heaven he did not believe in, they’re emptying a bottle of the good stuff tonight, and writing an angelic obit on deadline.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)

And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.

Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.

And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism.

On other fronts: His Clinton hatred was something more hysterical than reasonable (his book on the subject has the Lifetime Television Movie-worthy title “No One Left to Lie To”) and his grand campaign for atheism involved a good deal of silliness as well (Bertrand Russell did the case against God earlier and better). He had an unpleasantly boorish attitude toward women, best exemplified by his embarrassing “why women aren’t funny” bullshit. (Hitchens, it should be noted, enjoyed puns rather a lot.) And let’s not forget his immortal review of Wanda Sykes’ White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner: “The black dyke got it wrong.” Positively Butzian.

To the end he refused to admit he was “wrong” on the war, because his justifications for it shifted endlessly. The invasion was a humanitarian intervention “on the right side and for the right reasons” in a 2008 piece, in which he found the space to note that “the largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated,” but did not mention the war’s more than 100,000 casualties.

There was always something cartoonish about old “Hitch” the rakish intellectual character, puffing away on cigarettes and slurring bon mots in interviews, penning furious denunciations of hypocritical public figures while hosting salons and drunken parties at his Washington, D.C., apartment that some of the most powerful and prominent people in the world of politics and media attended. But his most monumental public crusade had devastating consequences that he never fully grappled with.

V-E and V-J Days, commemorating the end of World War II, set off the most joyous, raucous and heartfelt celebrations in U.S. history. Even our defeats are marked in memory: The end of the Vietnam War will forever be associated with the image of desperate South Vietnamese clinging to the last helicopter as it lifted off from the American Embassy in Saigon.

But the Iraq War is different. Except for the families of the troops still serving there, Americans tuned it out long ago. Nobody gives a damn about the Iraq War.

To admit this, however, would violate a cornerstone of American mythology: our need to believe that we take our wars seriously. So, the opening sentence of a Dec. 15 New York Times story titled “Obama Observes End of Iraq War” refers to Iraq as “a war now indelibly imprinted on the national psyche.”

The phrase is lofty and elegiac. Unfortunately, it is completely false. Iraq has never been imprinted on the national psyche at all, let alone “indelibly.” It is ending as it began: with the country half asleep.

Just as it is the newspaper of record’s quasi-official role to make such hollow claims, so it is the official duty of America’s leaders. Hence the red-white-and-blue speech President Obama gave to returning war veterans at Fort Bragg. First, Obama made an obligatory attempt to infuse the end of the war with gravitas: “Now, we knew this day would come. We’ve known it for some time. But still, there is something profound about the end of a war that has lasted so long.”

Then, because it is not permissible for a president to acknowledge that wars are sometimes follies that end ignominiously, Obama went on to make the obligatory assertion that America won the Iraq War:

“[E]verything that American troops have done in Iraq — all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering — all of it has led to this moment of success.”

Finally, having conferred this empty stamp of rhetorical approval, Obama whitewashed the motivations that actually led the Bush administration to start the war. In one of the most disgraceful sentences of his presidency, he said, “That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don’t make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.”

If Obama had gone on to add, “They hate us for our freedom,” his impersonation of George W. Bush would have been complete.

Obama was right to assert that the end of the war is a profound moment, and to implicitly call for Americans to reflect on it. But the formulaic patriotic phrases he spouted will not inspire the kind of reflection that is needed. They are meaningless sound bites, the equivalent of the genuflections to “our brave men and women in uniform” made by announcers at football games.

To truly honor those brave men and women in uniform – and, even more because there are more of them — the millions of Iraqis whose lives we destroyed, Americans need to look unflinchingly at this dreadful war.

They need to look at the ignorant, twisted and duplicitous men and women who started it, at the institutions that failed to stop it, and at their own complicity in it. Above all, they need to look at its terrible toll.

Nobody wants to think about Iraq. It was a mistake, and no one wants to dwell on mistakes. There are times when national forgetting is healthy. But this is not one of them. We need to remember.

We need to remember that this war was launched under false pretenses by an administration that used fake evidence to push it through. Americans need to remember their own understandable fear after 9/11, and how they allowed cunning and manipulative ideologues to exploit it.

We need to remember that the institutions that should have resisted the war – Congress and the media – completely failed to do so. Drugged by post-9/11 patriotism and groupthink, America’s representatives and their journalists abandoned their posts at the crucial hour.

We need to remember that the war was ruinously expensive. According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has spent $823 billion through fiscal year 2013. Other analysts have estimated that its total cost, including veterans’ benefits and healthcare, will be $3 trillion.

We need to remember that the war was a total failure. According to the respected Center for Strategic and International Studies:

“[T]he US invasion now seems to be a de facto grand strategic failure in terms of its costs in dollars and blood, its post-conflict strategic outcome, and the value the US could have obtained from different uses of its political, military, and economic resources.”

The war destabilized the Middle East, led to widespread hatred of the U.S., and increased the threat of terrorism. Its real winner was Iran.

Above all, Americans need to remember that the Iraq War was a war. A war that shattered an entire country. A war that resulted in the death of between 150,000 and 400,000 Iraqis, left 600,000 orphans and 1.3 million internally displaced persons. Almost 4,500 Americans died, and thousands more were so seriously wounded that their lives will never be the same.

Americans need to remember that war is the worst thing in the world. War is hell. War is this blood-spattered little girl screaming because her parents have just been shot dead by mistake at a checkpoint. War represents the complete defeat of the human spirit. Wars must never be fought unless absolutely necessary. Never. Never.

We need to remember this. For America’s wars have become weightless. They are fought by other people’s children, or by mercenaries, or by functionaries sitting inside mountains pushing buttons that launch missiles. They are no longer real. The way the Iraq War is ending, not with a bang but a barely audible whimper, is the way we make war now. The line between war and peace has disappeared. We are in a permanent state of quasi-war.

This is spiritually deadening. It is also dangerous. The unbearable lightness of war allows ideologues and fools to kill casually in our national name, without anyone paying attention. Since Iraq never happened, another Iraq is possible. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

On Memorial Day in 2007, I wrote that the best way to honor the men and women who had fallen in Iraq was to bring their comrades home. They are, at last, mercifully, home. And the best way to honor them is to make sure that neither their children, nor those of any other American’s, is ever sent off to fight and die in a needless war.

Their remoteness, which breeds detachment if not complacency at home, is no accident.  Indeed, it’s a product of the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq were wars of choice, not wars of necessity.  It’s a product of the fact that we’ve chosen to create a “warrior” or “war fighter” caste in this country, which we send with few concerns and fewer qualms to prosecute Washington’s foreign wars of choice.

The results have been predictable, as in predictably bad.  The troops suffer.  Iraqi and Afghan innocents suffer even more.  And yet we don’t suffer, at least not in ways that are easily noticeable, because of that very remoteness.  We’ve chosen — or let others do the choosing — to remove ourselves from all the pain and horror of the wars being waged in our name.  And that’s a choice we’ve made at our peril, since a state of permanent remote war has weakened our military, drained our treasury, and eroded our rights and freedoms.

Wars of Necessity vs. Wars of Choice

World War II was a war of necessity. In such a war, all Americans had a stake.  Adolf Hitler and Nazism had to be defeated; so too did Japanese militarism.  Indeed, war goals were that clear, that simple, to state.  For that war, we relied uncontroversially on an equitable draft of citizen-soldiers to share the burdens of defense.

Contrast this with our current 1 percent wars.  In them, 99 percent of Americans have no stake.  The 1 percent who do are largely ID-card-carrying members of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower so memorably called the “military-industrial complex” in 1961.  In the half-century since, that web of crony corporations, lobbyists, politicians and retired military types who have passed through Washington’s revolving door has grown ever more gargantuan and tangled, engorged by untold trillions devoted to a national security and intelligence complex that seemingly dominates Washington.  They are the ones who, in turn, have dispatched another 1 percent — the lone percent of Americans in our All-Volunteer Military — to repetitive tours of duty fighting endless wars abroad.

Unlike previous wars of necessity, the mission behind our wars of choice is nebulous, confusing, and seems in constant flux.  Is it a fight against terror (which, as so many have pointed out, is in any case a method, not an enemy)?  A fight for oil and other strategic resources?  A fight to spread freedom and democracy?  A fight to build nations?  A fight to show American resolve or make the world safe from al-Qaeda?  Who really knows anymore, now that Washington seldom bothers to bring up the “why” question at all, preferring simply to fight on without surcease?

In wars of choice, of course, the mission is whatever our leaders choose it to be, which gives the citizenry (assuming we’re watching closely, which we’re not) no criteria with which to measure success, let alone determine an endpoint.

How do we know these are wars of choice?  It’s simple: because we could elect to leave whenever we wanted or whenever the heat got too high, as is currently the case in Iraq (even if we are leaving behind a fortress embassy the size of the Vatican with a private army of 5,000 rent-a-guns to defend it), and as we are likely to do in Afghanistan sometime in the years after the 2012 presidential election.  The choice is ours.  The people without a choice are of course the Iraqis and Afghans whom we’ll leave to pick up the pieces.

Even our vaunted Global War on Terror is a war of choice.  Think about it: Who has control over our own terror: us or our enemies?  We can only be terrorized in the first place if we choose to give in to fear.

Think here of the “shoe bomber” in 2001 and the “underwear bomber” in 2009.  Why did the criminally inept actions of these two losers garner so much attention (and fear-mongering) in the American media?  As the self-confessed greatest and most powerful nation on Earth, shouldn’t we have shared a collective belly laugh at the absurdity and incompetence of those “attacks” and gone about our business?

Instead of laughing, of course, we allowed yet more American treasure to be poured into technology and screening systems that may never even have caught a terrorist.  We consented to be surveilled ever more and consulted ever less.  We chose to reaffirm our terrors every time we doffed our shoes or submitted supinely to being scoped or groped at our nation’s airports.

Our distant permanent wars, our 1 percent wars of choice, will remain remote from our emotions and our thinking, requiring few sacrifices except from our troops, who grow ever more remote from our polity.  This is especially true of America’s young adults, between 18 and 29 years of age, who are the least likely to have family members in the military, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

The result?  An already emergent warrior-caste might grow ever more estranged from the 99 percent, creating tensions and encouraging grievances that quite possibly could be manipulated by that other 1 percent: the powerbrokers, money-makers, and string-pullers, already so eager to call out the police to bully and arrest occupy movements in numerous cities across this once-great land.

Our Military or Their Military?

As we fight wars of choice in distant lands for ever-shifting goals, what if “our troops” simply continue to grow ever more remote from us?  What if they become “their” troops?  Is this not the true terror we should be mobilizing as a nation to prevent?  The terror of separating our military almost totally from our nation — and ourselves.

As Admiral Mike Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it recently to Time: “Long term, if the military drifts away from its people in this country, that is a catastrophic outcome we as a country can’t tolerate.”

Behold a horrifying fate: a people that allows its wars of choice to compromise the very core of its self-image as a freedom-loving society, while letting itself be estranged from the young men and women who served in the frontlines of these wars.

Here’s an American fact: the 99 percent are far too remote from our wars of choice and those who fight them.  To reclaim the latter, we must end the former.  And that’s a war of necessity that has to be fought — and won.

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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.”