But taken together, these considerations make him a man the Americans cannot ignore - even though they might have preferred his visit to come at another time.Simmering for many months, the row over Saddam's mythical WMD, whose existence was so vigorously promulgated by Mr Chalabi and his followers, has exploded into full view again with the CIA leak scandal. Instead he arrives in Washington seemingly as influential as ever.As deputy prime minister, he controls Iraq's oil industry, on which hopes of the country's future prosperity depend. He is moreover fresh from talks last week in Tehran with Iran's new President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - indeed some speculate here that he is carrying a private message for Washington from the Tehran leadership, though US officials deny this.Mr Chalabi has also repositioned himself in Iraq's internal politics by breaking away from the increasingly Islamist Shia coalition that dominates Iraqi politics and announcing plans to run independent candidates in the parliamentary elections set for 15 December. He was seen as the administration's candidate for the first prime minister of the new Iraq.Before the war, he and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) organisation supplied information, used by the Bush administration to justify the war, about Baghdad's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and assured officials that US occupying forces would be greeted as liberators. Once again he has manoeuvred himself into a position where Washington cannot ignore him. The FBI investigation into the alleged intelligence leak has been put on a back-burner, and Mr Chalabi himself has not yet even been questioned.
Within days of the invasion, Mr Chalabi was ferried back into the country by a special Pentagon plane.Then everything went downhill. The WMD information soon proved to be false while, far from being welcomed by the local population, American troops are still embroiled in a war with an insurgency that if anything grows stronger.Quickly his relations with Washington worsened, to the point where, in mid-2004, his headquarters in Baghdad were raided by US and Iraqi forces following allegations that he had leaked vital intelligence to Iran, including the information that US cryptanalysts had cracked a secret Iranian code.But Ahmad Chalabi should never be counted out. Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, 61, from the Paris suburb of Stains, had been in a coma since being beaten by youths on Friday as he and a companion were putting out a fire in a rubbish bin outside their block of flats.. Amid fears that the violence was spiralling out of control, French authorities announced that a record number of 1,408 cars had been set on fire across France including 426 in Paris on the 11th consecutive night of rioting on Sunday The first fatality of the riots was also reported. Iraq's deputy prime minister, Ahmad Chalabi, returns to Washington today in his latest incarnation - as a secular Shia leader who could offer Washington a way out of the morass into which he helped lead it two and a half years ago.
The week-long visit, during which he will meet Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, and John Snow, the Treasury Secretary, and possibly Vice-President Dick Cheney, caps a remarkable comeback by a political operator who is probably without peer. Before the 2003 invasion, the exiled Mr Chalabi was the favourite of Mr Cheney and the Pentagon, cherished by the neoconservatives who urged the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As the band struck up "La Marseillaise" before the friendly match in the Stade de France, in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, the national anthem was booed. But what shocked France was that those who booed were not Algerian fans but French-born second and third-generation immigrants with French nationality. The banlieues had spoken, and the catcalls from the suburbs were telling the government that the country's model of integration had failed.. A curfew was in force last night in a riot-hit town north of Paris as Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, warned that such a radical measure could become widespread as part of a crackdown against rioters across France. 27 October: Rioting starts in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where it is confined for the next four nights.