Its allowance of his first visit to Washington in more than two years is widely seen as America once again giving a stamp of approval to his actions. The Bush administration, buffeted by sectarian confrontations over the new constitution, has quietly reopened channels with Mr Chalabi. But since then Mr Chalabi has once again reinvented himself, cutting links with the ruling Shia alliance which has strong links with Tehran and declaring that he is a moderate. That tyrant Saddam has gone and the Americans are in Baghdad What was said before was not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat.” The nadir in the relationship came when the US accused him of spying for Iran and his Baghdad offices were raided. For the short, rotund and sharply dressed Mr Chalabi, this has been a remarkable reversal of fortune.

Flown into Iraq in an USAF plane as Washington’s choice as Iraq’s post-Saddam leader, he quickly fell out with his American sponsors. As it became increasingly obvious that no weapons of mass destruction were to be found, American officials turned on Mr Chalabi His reaction was to say: “We are heroes in error.

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As far as we’ve been concerned we’ve been entirely successful. Also there to welcome him back into the fold will be his influential backers among the neo-conservatives, who he had helped so much with their grand plan for starting the Iraq war by providing ‘defectors’ who ‘revealed’ that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. Mr Chalabi has launched his National Iraqi Congress alliance, List 569, for the December election in alliance with Sharif Ali, a cousin of former King Feisal II, who is running on a monarchist ticket.

On a wider basis he is also making overtures to the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Shia Fadillah Party. The manoeuvres by Mr Chalabi to become Iraq’s new prime minister will take him next to Washington, where he will meet a number of senior administration figures including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Treasury Secretary John Snow and National Security Advisor John Snow. The man chiefly responsible for supplying the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ excuse for the Iraq invasion, Ahmad Chalabi, has once again announced his intentions to play a pivotal role in the country’s political process. On Sunday the Romanian president, Traian Basescu, said that a deal on US bases in his country would come "very soon" A reward, perhaps, for America's new European allies.. Meanwhile, the two nations that are due to join the EU in 2007, Romania and Bulgaria, both Romania and Bulgaria allowed their bases to be used for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also have troops in the south-central zone of Iraq. Both want to host US military bases and, in total, around 5,000 US military personnel will be deployed to Romania and Bulgaria next year under a plan to shift resources from Cold War bases in Germany to more flexible and rapidly-deployable units. Viewed from the fast-growing economies of central and Eastern Europe, America's ability to generate wealth compares favourably with the more sclerotic Franco-German model. And even the invasion of Iraq was relatively well received:Latvia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania have all contributed to the multinational forces.