Bingo

According to the headline of his New York Times obituary, Chalabi “pushed for U.S. invasion.” The Washington Post‘s headline says he “helped spur U.S. invasion,” and Reuters explains that he “pushed Bush to invade Iraq.”

And it’s true, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress provided a big chunk of the “intelligence” the Bush administration used to make their case for the invasion. Chalabi was also a source for much of the New York Times‘ atrocious reporting on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and was mentioned by name when the Times was finally forced to apologize. Moreover, he couldn’t have been much more in your face about it afterwards, charmingly explaining in 2004 that “We are heroes in error. 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.”

But if Americans want to blame someone for the Iraq War, we should be looking closer to home — at Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and ourselves. As former CIA officer Robert Baer put it: “Chalabi was scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed.”

  The Intercept

Precisely.  All you have to do is know what you want said. You can always find someone to say it.

All the evidence indicates the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq with or without him. According to Mickey Herskowitz, Bush’s one-time ghostwriter, Bush was hoping to invade Iraq as early as 1999. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, later claimed that Bush had begun planning for war with Iraq within days of his inauguration. And on September 12, 2001, Bush was demanding that his top terrorism advisor find out if there were any way to blame the previous day’s attacks on Saddam Hussein.

[...]

The U.S. was buying lies that would help it invade Iraq, and paying top dollar. Even if Ahmed Chalabi had never lived, someone else would have been selling.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.