Want to know 336 useless facts?

Useless Facts


For every human being on earth, there are about 200 million insects.


The harmonica is the world's most popular instrument.


By the time they are 65 years old, most Americans have watched more than nine years worth of television.


The puck in ice hockey can travel at up to 118 mph (190 km/h).


If you stretched all the nerves in the body from end to end, they would be about 47 miles long.


Humans have more than 600 muscles in their bodies.


Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.


Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.


There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.


The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.


A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.


There are more chickens than people in the world.


Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey.


The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."


All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20.


No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.


"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt."


All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.


Almonds are a member of the peach family.


Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance.


Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.


The largest cabbage weighed 144 lbs.


There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.


Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula" - and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: "L.A."


A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.


An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.


Tigers have striped skin, not just stripped fur.


In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.


Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.


The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life."


A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.


A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.


It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. (DON'T try this at home!)


The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.


In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.


The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.


Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister.


There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball.


"Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.


Many hamsters blink one eye at a time.


The inventor of the flushing toilet was Thomas Crapper.


The average bed is home to over 6 billion dust mites.


Plastic lawn flamingos outnumber real flamingos in the U.S.A.


Whitby, Ontario has more donut stores per capita than any other place in the world.


Starfish have no brain.


Dolphins sleep with one eye open.


Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel with over 50,000 words, none of which containing the letter "E".


Bulls are color blind.


A can of SPAM is opened every 4 seconds.


"Babe" was played by over 48 pigs.


Mosquitoes have 47 teeth.


Lip stick contains fish scales.


The Poison Arrow frog has enough poison to kill 2200 people.


The largest known kidney stone weighed 1.36 kilograms.


Kidney stones come in any color from yellow to brown.


Women blink twice as many times as men do.


The McDonalds at the SkyDome in Toronto, Ontario is the only one in the world that sells hot dogs.


A bowling pin only has to tilt 7.5 degrees in order to fall down.


The first episode of Leave It To Beaver aired on October 4, 1957.


Beaver Cleaver's locker number is 9.


The first flushing toilet seen on TV was on Leave It To Beaver.


Jerry Seinfeld's apartment number (on the show) is 5A. In the old episodes it was 3A.


The life span of a taste bud is ten days.


Pi has been calculated to 2,260,321,363 digits.


The billionth digit in Pi is 9.


The first 100 numbers of Pi are:


3.141592653589793238462643383279502884...


58209749445923078164062862089986280348...


Click HERE for 99,999 digits of pi!


A stretched out Slinky is 87 feet long.


An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.


Emus can't walk backwards.


A group of unicorns is called a blessing.


A group of kangaroos is called a mob.


A group of whales is called a pod.


A group of geese is called a gaggle.


A group of owls is called a parliament.


A group of ravens is called a murder.


A group of bears is called a sleuth.


12 or more cows is called a flink.


A baby oyster is called a spat.


Chickens can't swallow while they are upside down.


In the October 22, 1945 edition of Life magazine there was a picture of a chicken with its head cut off. It was alive too!


The average garden variety caterpillar has 248 muscles in its head.


Pinocchio was made of pine.


The largest pumpkin weighed 377 lbs.


A mule won't sink in quicksand but a donkey will.


More people are killed annually by donkeys than in airplane crashes.


Alfred Hitchcock had no belly button for it was eliminated during surgery.


There are 22 stars in the Paramount logo.


The average human produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in a lifetime.


A quarter has 119 grooves around the edge.


A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.


Cranberry Jell-0 is the only kind that contains real fruit.


The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.


Every time you lick a stamp you consume 1/10 of a calorie.


The pound sign # is called anoctothorpe.


Maine is the toothpick capital of the world.


New Jersey has a spoon museum with over 5,400 spoons from almost all the states.


There was once a town in West Virginia called "6".


Singapore only has one train station.


The parking meter was invented in North Dakota.


Napolean made his battle plans in a sandbox.


Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse a senator.


The green stuff on the occasional freak potatoe chip is chlorophyll.


If you ate too many carrots you would turn orange.


Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's making Pluto the eighth planet from the sun. It has been that way since 1979 and will remain that way until 1999.


The earth is approx. 6,588,000,000,000,000,000 tons.


The force of 1 billion people jumping at the same time is equal to 500 tons of TNT.


Popeye was 5'6".


Howdy Doody had 48 freckles.


The first word spoken on the moon was "Okay".


Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon with his left foot first.


The average speed of Heinz ketchup leaving the bottle is 25 miles per year.


Hilary Clinton once said We are the President.


The percent of women who wash their hands after leaving a restroom is 80%.


The percent of men who wash their hands after using a restroom is 55%.


There are 333 toilet paper squares on a toilet paper roll.


The Eifel Tower has 2,500,000 rivets in it.


"Jaws" is the most common name for a goldfish.


On an average work day, a typist's fingers travel 12.6 miles.


The average American eats 2 donuts a day.


The longest word in the Old Testament is Malhershalahashbaz.


The longest time a person has been in a coma is 37 years.


Every minute in the U.S 6 people turn 17.


It takes the Where's Waldo artist one month to complete a drawing.


2500 lefties die each year using products designed for righties.


A baby is born every 7 seconds.


10 tons of space dust fall on the Earth everyday.


On average, a 4 year old child asks 437 questions a day.


Blue and white are the most common school colors.


Swimming pools in Phoenix, Arizona, pick up 20 pounds of dust a year.


The first message tapped by Samuel Morse over his invention the telegraph was: What hath God wrought?.


The first words spoken by over Alexander Bell over the telephone were: Watson, please come here. I want you.


The first words spoken by Thomas Edison over the phonograph were: Mary had a little lamb


The three words in the English language with the letters uu are: vacuum, residuum and continuum.


A baby in Florida was named: Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestd... His middle name is George James.


It is illegal to ride a street car on Sunday if have been eating garlic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.


In a normal life time an American will eat 200 pounds of peanuts and 10,000 pounds of meat.


A new book is published every 13 minutes in America.


America's best selling ice-cream flavour is vanilla.


American's eat 18 billion hot dogs a year.


American's eat 134 pounds of sugar a year.


Every year the sun loses 360 million tons.


Because of Animal Crackers, many kids until they reach the age of ten, believe a bear is as tall as a giraffe.


You can tell if a skunk is about if you smell only .000 000 000 000 071 ounce of its spray.


Animal breeders in Russia once claimed to have bred sheep with blue wool.


Penguins are the only bird that can leap into the air like porpoises.


India has 50 million monkeys.


By some unknown means, an iguana can end its own life.


Americans spend around $3 billion for cat and dog food a year.


Pigs can cover a mile in 7.5 minutes when running at top speed.


You breathe about 10 million times a year.


The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you'll have a bad dream.


The first non-human to win an Oscar was Mickey Mouse.


Lee Harvey Oswald was booked with mugshot number 54018.


The Gulf Stream could carry a message in a bottle at an average of 4 miles per hour.


The bullseye on a dartboard must be 5 feet 8 inches off the ground.


The foot is the most common body part bitten by insects.


The most common time for a wake up call is 7am.


The doorbell was invented in 1831.


The are 255 squares on a Scrabble board.


The electric shaver was patented on November 6, 1928.


There are 500 sheets of paper in a ream.


The monkey wrench was invented by Charles Moncke.


Japan is the largest exporter of frog's legs.


There are seven points on the Statue of Liberty's crown.


There are approx. 550 hairs in the eyebrow.


The most common non-contagious disease in the world is tooth decay.


The shell constitutes 12 percent of an egg's weight.


A squid has 10 tentacles.


A snail's reproductive organs are in its head.


A cow's only sweat glands are in its nose.


The word "AND" appears 46,277 times in the Bible.


The first word played in the Scrabble rules demonstration game is "horn".


The telephone's U.S. patent number is 174,465.


The typical person goes to the bathroom 6 times a day.


There are 17 steps leading up to Sherlock Holme's apartment.


When a horned toad is angry, it squirts blood from it's eyes.


Napoleon was terrified of cats.


The first Lifesaver flavor was peppermint.


The typical American eats 263 eggs a year.


The ballpoint pen was invented in 1938 by Laszlo and Georg Biro.


The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger.


The parking meter was invented by C.C. Magee in 1935.


In 1961, an IBM 7090 computer calculated Pi to 100 265 digits.


The human body weighs forty times more than the brain.


After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp.


A person swallows approximately 295 times while eating dinner.


The oldest known vegetable is the pea.


Jack is the most common name in nursery rhymes.


The avocado has the most calories of any fruit.


The first zoo in the USA was in Philadelphia.


The letter N ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.


France has the highest per capita consumption of cheese.


The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.


4000 people are injured by teapots each year.


The typical American consumes 27 pounds of cheese each year.


The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is feedback.


The ostrich has a 46 foot long small intestine.


The state of California raises the most turkeys out of all of the states.


The most sensitive finger on the human hand is the index finger.


George Washington Carver invented peanut butter.


The typical hen lays 19 dozen eggs a year.


Stainless stell was invented by Harry Brearley in 1913.


A scallop has 35 blue eyes.


The left leg of a chicken in more tender than the right one.


The only dog that doesn't have a pink tongue is the chow.


Iceland was the first country to legalize abortion in 1935.


The giraffe has the highest blood pressure of any animal.


The dumbest domesticated animal is the turkey.


Russia has the most movie theaters in the world.


Albert Blake Dick invented the mimeograph machine.


The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.


The most fatal car accidents occur on Saturday.


An Oscar weighs seven pounds.


It takes the typical person seven minutes to fall asleep.


Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer.


The Eiffel Tower has 1792 steps.


The mongoose was barred live entry into the U.S. in 1902.


Ants stretch when they wake up in the morning.


Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor, was afraid of the dark.


About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30.


A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 600 m.p.h.


The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year.


Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet.


Owls are the only birds who can see the color blue.


A jellyfish is 95 percent water.


The elephant is the only mammal that can't jump.


The penguin is the only bird who can swim, but not fly.


America once issued a 5-cent bill.


Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.


Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung.


A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue.


Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.


Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.


Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.


You blink about 84,000,000 times a year.


In England, in the 1880's, "Pants" was considered a dirty word.


A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans.


Every 45 seconds, a house catches on fire in the United States.


The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.


A hummingbird weighs less than a penny.


A cockroach will live nine days without it's head, before it starves to death.


The most used letter in the English alphabet is 'E', and 'Q' is the least used.


Dogs and cats, like humans, are either right of left handed... or is that pawed?


The opposite sides of a dice cube always add up to seven.


Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lighting than women.


Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions.


Bulls are colorblind, therefore will usually charge at a matador's waving cape no matter what color it is -- be it red or neon yellow.


Apples are more efficient than caffeine in keeping people awake in the mornings.


Smelling bananas and/or green apples (smelling, not eating) can help you lose weight.


After eating, a housefly regurgitates its food and then eats it again!


When someone annoys you, it takes 42 muscles to frown, but it only takes 4 muscles to extend your arm and whack them in the head.


Coca-Cola was originally green.


Hong Kong has the most Rolls Royce's per capita.


Alaska is the state with highest percent of people who walk to work.


28 percent of Africa is wilderness.


38 percent of America is wilderness.


A duck's quack does not echo and no one knows why.


It costs $6400 to raise a medium size dog to age of 11.


Average number of people airborne over the U.S. during any given hour: 61,000.


70 percent of Americans who visited Disneyland/World.


Intelligent people have more copper and zinc in their hair.


The youngest pope was 11 years old.


Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other country.


The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet and was developed by Western Union to test telex/twx communications.


Average life span of a major league baseball: 7 pitches.


The San Francisco Cable cars are the only "mobile" National Monuments.


The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter "uncopyrightable."


Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ?


The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and learned how to walk up standard staircases.


When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror.


The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because, when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building.


111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321


Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of unwanted people (without killing them) used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."


Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later.


The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.


David Prowse was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know his voice was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie.


The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.


The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel fuel that it burns.


The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado.


Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.


If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar.


No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Superbowl.


The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League All-star Game.


Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.


Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than new cars.


The 3 most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.


It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.


Ninety percent of New York City cabbies are recently arrived immigrants.


In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.


Reno, Nevada is west of Los Angeles, California.


The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.


If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.


The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.


Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.


On average people fear spiders more than they do death.


You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.


You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.


Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.


In ancient Egypt, Priests plucked every hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.


A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.


Butterflies taste with their feet.


A cat's urine glows under a blacklight.


The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time television were Fred and Wilma Flintstone.


Coca Cola was originally green.


The Ten Commandments contain 297 words.


The Bill of Rights is stated in 463 words.


Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains 266 words.


A recent federal directive to regulate the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.


There are more collect calls made on Father's Day than on any other day.


Every day more money is printed for monopoly than the US Treasury.


Men can read smaller print than women, women can hear better than men.


Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33.


The world's youngest parents were 8 %26amp; 9 and lived in China in 1910.


Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil


Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace.


The youngest Pope was 11 years old.


"I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.


The nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosey is a rhyme about the bubonic plague. Infected people with the plague would get red circular sores (Ring around the Rosey...). These sores would smell very bad so people would hide flowers on their bodies in an attempt to mask the smell ("pocket full of posies..."). People who died from the plague would be burned to reduce the spread of the disease ("ashes, ashes, we all fall down").


The citrus soda 7-UP was created in 1929; "7" was selected because the original containers were 7 ounces. "UP" indicated the direction of the bubbles.


Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.


Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.


The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.


American car horns beep in the tone of F.


No piece of paper can be folded more than 7 times.


1 in every 4 Americans has appeared on television.


You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.


Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age or older.


The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.


The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.


A Boeing 747s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother's first flight.


American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating 1 olive from each salad served in first-class.


Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.


The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."


The 57 on the Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had.


Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin.

Want to know 336 useless facts?
Not really.... : )





"Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's making Pluto the eighth planet from the sun. It has been that way since 1979 and will remain that way until 1999." ... seriously did it take you more than 8 years to type that all out??? lol





And what do you mean no piece of paper can be folded seven times????





I typed this entire sentance with just my left hand: trixtadextaphobia.





This entire one was typed by just my right hand: stewardesses.





Sir Thomas Crapper was a royal plumber but he did not invent the toilet.





That a goldfish's attention-span/memory is only three seconds is actually urban myth.





What about "I'm."?





My dogs' parents were all less than 8 years old.





Some men are blind, some women deaf.





Etc. etc. etc....





However, if you listed about 400 things I do believe that 336 of them might honestly be worthless fact.
Reply:hey one thing you forgot to mention was....





3 of the things are listed twice each.





so technically you didnt even write as many useless facts as you thought ... but i was still saved from boredom for about 5 minutes. Report Abuse

Reply:HOW IN THE WORD DID YOU GET THIS ALL TO FIT ON ONE THING without putting: "additional details?!?!?!?!" Report Abuse

Reply:i meant world Report Abuse

Reply:I LIKE TURTLES!!!! Report Abuse

Reply:Despite urban legend, Crapper did not invent the flush toilet. Few other urban legends in there too Report Abuse

Reply:awesome man,thanks for posting! Report Abuse

Reply:The TV show Mythbusters proved you can fold paper more than 7 times.The paper must be VERY thin and big. They reference a girl who did it as a school project. She folded 1/4 mile of toilet paper ~13 times. Mythbusters did a HUGE sheet of paper and got either 13 or 28 times. Report Abuse

Reply:Mythbusters also proved goldfish can be trained to go through a maze to find food. So the 3-second memory is also false. Report Abuse

Reply:'m headin over russia ^^ :PP Report Abuse

Reply:wow i actually read all those but not all are correct.


i can type stwerdesses with both of my hand Report Abuse

Reply:Also, "Go" is the shortest sentence in the English language, because the subject is implied as "you" and the verb is "Go"





Not "I am" Report Abuse

Reply:he means that any piece of paper can't be folded in HALF 7 times. believe me i trided alot of times Report Abuse

Reply:i love friends Report Abuse

Reply:Did you know that the word count for all of that was 3,985 wordss, Report Abuse

Reply:carrots turn u yellow not orange if u gorge on carrots and tomatoes then ur orange also i red them all post more Report Abuse

Reply:Actually, women do not blink twice as much as men. I have tested this, and men blink more than women. Report Abuse

Reply:stfu ! xD Report Abuse

Reply:I saw that mythbusters where they folded the paper. It was in fact more than 7 times. But the paper they used was extremely large. Interesting facts, it gave me something to do though some are false. Report Abuse

Reply:I WOUD NOT SIT THEIR AND READ ALL THAT Report Abuse

Reply:...And to really think someone would sit there and read all of that.
Reply:What is so interesting is that I knew at least half of these already.
Reply:very interesting, u make it hard to get two points-haha

What are the truthfully safe areas of BK for a 20 yr old Native Brooklyn girl to live alone?

I have been helping others find apartments and guiding them into which areas they should or shouldn't get apartments in. But now that it is time for me to actually take the plunge myself (by myself), i'm feeling pretty clueless. Other then the obvious areas (i'm from Brooklyn Heights) such as Carroll Gardens Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Bay Ridge, what are the truthfully safe neighborhoods that i'd at least feel decent about traveling at night back to my apartment if i lived there? I'm gonna be getting out of school in the city at around 10 pm. I know that some of our neighborhoods are better then others, but i'm really not sure how shady or safe they are because i've never actually lived there and everything is changing. I know how to get around, so i'm willing to live anywhere in bk if it is genuinely safe. Can anybody go down the list for me and give me the truth? Thanks in advance.

What are the truthfully safe areas of BK for a 20 yr old Native Brooklyn girl to live alone?
Midwood is pretty quiet and safe. Easily accessible by the Q too.
Reply:Sea Gate. It's west of Coney Island, protected by a gate, it's a private area.





Lived there for the first 10 years of my life, was a really good area with good people.





Also has it's own police department.
Reply:Lots of my friends live in Williamsburg, which they say is pretty safe at night and has an active nightlife, and its residents include many aspiring artists, musicians and writers. Plus it's just outside of Manhattan, across the bridge. Stick to areas near the L train (instead of the J train, which I personally hate -- I used to live in the Bushwick area), even better.
Reply:I have lived in bay ridge all my life. I just moved to Staten Island because I needed more room, (I have two children). I loved living in bay ridge. There is so much to do, restuarants, shopping, nightlife, not to mention a very safe place. I think you would be very happy there.

Plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.?

November 5, 2006


Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi


By DEXTER FILKINS


1. London, August 2006





Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way.





The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children.





The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began.





For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards.





But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster.





“The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.”





Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now.





“We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.”





Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists).





In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake.





“It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.”





It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included.





“In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’





“What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.”





Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native.





“I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.”





And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi?





Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq?





2. Mushkhab, January 2005





The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want.





We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long.





The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast.





An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans.





The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest.





“Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.”





Everyone laughs.





We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone.





“My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.”





He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him.





“On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.”





Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret.





It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink.





Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf.





By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon.





Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street.





More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase.





It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day.





The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head.





“Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.”





No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became.





In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him.





On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come.





Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining.





“The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.”





Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East.





It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort.





For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer.





But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him.





“Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.”





3. Baghdad, October 2005





Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari.





Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq.





Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market.





“Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.”





Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie.





On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate.





“Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.”





Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003.





Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein.





Dexter Filkins





The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall.





For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.”





One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.”





Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist.





Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would.





The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true.





“For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.”





So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway.





A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice.





One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out.





“Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.”





4. Washington, November 2005





The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten.





Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister.





Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.





Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming.





“This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps.





Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.”





By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco.





“Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.”





Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said.





As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries.





“He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch.





The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.”





Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement.





“There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi.





Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?”





There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government.





“I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ”





A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.”





Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq.





Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him.





It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi %26amp; Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade.





“In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says.





This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me.





One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein.





“We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?”





Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi.





“I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.”





Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs.





“It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says.





But the story doesn’t end there.





A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.)





Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks.





David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it.





“In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.”





Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.”





Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said.





Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources.





“We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.”





Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.”





Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear?





“I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.”





5. Tehran, November 2005





Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran.





The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does.





“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.”





Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.





“Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.”





Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries.





In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world.





An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared.





More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks.





Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser.





I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.”





Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room.





At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together.





As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless.





Chalabi played it cool.





“The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad.





Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.”





For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art?





So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves.





“Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands.





We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro.





“Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.”





A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind.





For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men.





“It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes.





Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact.





Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear.





6. Baghdad, December 2005





A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes.





As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask.





“Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English.





Whom are you going to vote for?





“The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.”





When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.





But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street.





The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate.





Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election.





He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate.





As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots.





But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war.





Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end.





Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer.





7. London, August 2006





The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own.





He doesn’t hesitate to answer.





“Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”

Plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.?
I really thought about helping you out here, just because it would be fun to write. Then I looked at your profile and see that:





1. You answer other people's questions so obviously without care and thought and apparently just for points so you can go ask more questions.





and





2. The people that are gracious enough to assist you or answer your questions most of the time don't even recieve the courtesy of you selecting the "best answer" but they are instead selected by voters.





So instead I decide that if you are not interested in doing the right, then why in the world should anyone be interested in helping you?
Reply:So this is a "do my homework" question? Report Abuse

Reply:i agree with stymie :) Report Abuse

Reply:nicely done Report Abuse

Reply:Yep, quite agree Report Abuse

Reply:You can never underestimate the USA and the lenghtd they will go to to save a dime on a gallon of crude.there were no WMD's and if there were, they were planted by the U.S Report Abuse

Reply:wow..go stymie! lol Report Abuse

Reply:thats wayyy to long like what do u want from us? that will take forever!!!!!!!!! Report Abuse

Reply:The main idea should look like this and I do not have a monopoly on this heading


'Lies and Liers who Lie them' Report Abuse