Who is Ahmed Chalabi and who are his enemies?

Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post provides a portrait of his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader. Hoagland warns us not to believe the smear campaign against Chalabi launched by “the anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-change crowd” and by the U.S. State Department (which perhaps is part of that crowd). Hoagland’s most telling sentence is this one: “When you hear Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage maligning Chalabi, you hear the institutional voices of Saudi Arabia and Egypt speaking through him.”