While the Pentagon has backed Mr Chalabi, and air-lifted him into southern Iraq, both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have severe doubts about the exile (who left Iraq in 1958 at the age of 13), even though he helped lead an aborted CIA-sponsored plot to overthrow Saddam in the mid-1990s.
He will doubtless at some point in the troubled mid-2010s help President Obama to evade a Ku Klux Klan plot down in the wilds of Alabama or be of vital assistance to the U.S. Commerce Department in the matter of pilfered commercial blueprints on their way to China.
Despite cavernous plot holes and some unabashed Chinese-nationalist speechifying, the spectacle of intellect thwarted in mid-flight has a moody resonance.