Just now catching up on my Friday FT, I found there an article that lays out a pretty clear timeline for why Chalabi now. (It's by Peter Spiegel on p. 6 in the US edition for those following at home, last 6 paragraphs) (for the online version, you need to be a subscriber):
[Bracketed comments by me.]
<begin excerpt>
Suspicions that Mr Challabi had fed the CIA faulty intelligence in the months preceding war have circulated in Washington and Baghdad almost since Mr Hussein was toppled, but there have been much more public accusations recently.
Colin Powell, whose State Department has always been dismissive of the INC, said in an interview with NBC at the weekend that he now believed that CIA was intentionally misled on claims that Iraq was developing mobile biological weapons labortories.
[I.e., in the famous interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press against a balmy Jordanian seacoast background, where his assistant tried to jerk away the camera, and he forced his way back on to say this. The emphasis here on "deliberately misled" and that it was specifically this bit of information.]
Much of that information, a central claim in Mr Powell's presentation to the UN before the war, caem from an Iraqi engineer who is now believed to have had close ties to the INC.
[See Linkname: [lbo-talk] Judy Miller's source
URL: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20040517/010987.html]
[This specific evidence that Chalabi inserted a specific piece of disinfo into the intelligence process, and was thus personally responsible for the intelligence break-down, was the means by which the Pentagon was browbeaten into cutting off his monthly $335,000 payments for intelligence -- a necessary step before he could be raided, which happened just days before.]
Of more relevance to the current state of play in Iraq, Mr Chalabi has come into direct conflict with Paul Bremer, the occupation's adminstrator, over thousands of documents believed to show widespread corrupation in the UN's oil-for-food programme during Mr Hussein's rule.
[I.e., the complete Baathist files which Chalabi has been given control of and was refusing to give back. The corruption in the oil-for-food program is of no importance to anything real -- everyone knew it at the time -- it's a large part of how we supported the Kurdish pseudo-state, through smuggling across its borders -- and morally the corruption was far less a crime than the economic sanctions themselves -- but it's considered of prime importance ideologically by conservatives, not only as a means to move the debate back to the evils of everyone else by the US, but also as a means of casting aspersions on the UN.]
[Far more important, of course, is that these Baathist files are power, and it is a power they had to get back from Chalabi if they were going to partially reverse Baathism. But they couldn't call it by its real name, because the reversal of de-Baathification has lots of rhetorical problems, both domestically in the US and even more among Shiites and Kurds in Iraq. So they focussed on the UN aspect, which made it more palatable for both parties. At any rate, Chalabi was refusing to hand over files the CPA was calling indispensable: that's the simple justification for the raid. And in fact those files are indispensable, although not for the reasons listed.]
US officials denied yesterday that the raid had anything to do with the dispute over custody of documents held by the INC, but INC officials said the records had been seized in the raid.
Both the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Mr Bremer, and the UN have begun investigating the allegations, but the efforts have been hampered by Mr Chalabi's control of evidence.
<end of excerpt>
Michael