WHY WE DON'T ARREST CHALABI

Mark Kleiman has the simple answer to the question everyone's asking: Why don't we arrest Chalabi -- that as a foreign national, he didn't break any of our laws.

So it was neither disloyal nor illegal for him to take information some American official gave him and use it as seemed best to him for the good of his country, his party, his sect, and himself. If he acted contrary to the interests or laws of Iraq, that's for the Iraqis to decide.

But it was illegal (though not, I'm sure, subjectively disloyal) for the American official, whoever he was, to share such a sensitive secret with a foreigner. And that's why it was illegal: foreigners aren't to be trusted with such secrets.

Similarly, if Chalabi did in fact help con the United States into liberating his country from a tyrant that's something he can legitimately brag about. (Though it was somewhat impolitic of him to do so as volubly as he did.) Deception is, after all, a legitimate tool of diplomacy. If Franklin deceived the court of Louis XVI into providing help to the American Revolution, would anyone call that misconduct on Franklin's part?

What seems to have happened here is that Chalabi remembered where his loyalties lay, while his neocon sponsors forgot. He conned them. Their bad, not his.

UPDATE: Fred Kaplan of Slate has a different take on the subject.