The recent threats and accusations that the defense minister in Iraq, Hazem Shaalan, has made against Ahmad Chalabi illustrate nothing so much as the urgency of the elections that will elevate a new, democratic government in Baghdad. On Friday, Mr. Shaalan announced that Mr. Chalabi would soon be arrested and turned over to the Jordanian authorities on an outstanding warrant from 1992 regarding the collapse of Petra Bank. Among the charges Mr. Shaalan leveled against the leader of the Iraqi National Congress was that he defamed Mr. Shaalan’s reputation. This follows Mr. Chalabi’s accusation last week that Mr. Shaalan was not only in the employ of Saddam’s Baathist regime, but that he had also tried to embezzle some $300 million out of Iraq and move it to Lebanon and Jordan for a mysterious arms deal.

The latest round of charges fits a familiar pattern. Since the liberation of Iraq, Mr. Chalabi has been disparaged on numerous occasions, with each libel designed to derail Mr. Chalabi’s possible accession. In April 2003, the Central Intelligence Agency released a “poll” of Iraqis who said Mr. Chalabi was an unsuitable leader for Iraq because he was so corrupt. In April 2004, the CIA and the National Security Agency presented intercepts they said proved that Mr. Chalabi had compromised an American penetration of an Iranian military communications channel. In the summer, an Iraqi judge appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority tried to arrest Mr. Chalabi for possession of the equivalent of less than $2 worth of counterfeit dinars.

In the latest fracas, two facts stand out. One is that Mr. Shaalan gave the interview announcing the charges against Mr. Chalabi to Al-Jazeera. The station was effectively banned from Iraq last year because its reporting increasingly resembled the propaganda campaign of the Al Qaeda-Baathist alliance that today threatens to murder those Iraqis brave enough to cast ballots at the end of the month. It is Mr. Shaalan’s job to catch the Iraqi Klansmen. Yet on Friday he gave the terrorist mouthpiece the scoop that Mr. Chalabi should be arrested.

The second is that Mr. Shaalan decided to make the announcement from Amman. Some day an enterprising scholar may write a book exposing the Jordanian shenanigans in the current war. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that the Hashemite kingdom lobbied for men like Mr. Shaalan to assume power last June when the Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved and an interim regime was established under the leadership of Iyad Allawi. While Mr. Shaalan was in the capital of Iraq’s neighbor, Mr. Chalabi was campaigning in Basra, a city Mr. Allawi would not enter this weekend when he arrived at its airport for a meeting later canceled by its mayor.

Only a month ago, Mr. Shaalan and Prime Minister Allawi privately urged the White House to cancel the elections that will likely result in their early retirement from Iraqi politics. When the president demurred, Mr. Shaalan threatened to arrest those who are poised to defeat him with the ballot. That is the context of the latest developments. What’s worse, if Mr. Chalabi is correct, then Mr. Shaalan also tried to make off with $300 million of the Iraqi people’s money to Lebanon before he left office. The Arabic newspaper, al-Hayat, reports today that Iraq’s central bank has recovered $200 million.

All this confronts President Bush with important questions. How did someone who is resorting to these Baathist tactics on the eve of his country’s first free nationwide election come to run the military? Wasn’t the point of Operation Iraqi Freedom to put an end to this cycle of corruption that has strangled real politics in Arabia for over two generations? At least that was what the president decided to emphasize Thursday in his second inaugural address when he said, “America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause.”

It is apparent now that Mr. Bush’s National Security Council, CIA and State Department did not get the message. Last spring this troika selected the regime that will most likely fall on January 30. The fact that large sums of money are now going missing from Iraq’s treasury before these elections is part of an intelligence failure of a higher order of magnitude than anything yet investigated by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Did the president’s best and brightest advisers choose thugs and thieves to steer Iraq from occupation to democracy? As we go down to the wire in the election, it’s starting to look like Mr. Chalabi – who worked so closely with the bipartisan leadership of the Senate to get the strategic legislative foundations of this war passed with the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and who warned against the kind of mistakes made by the interim government – has one of the cleanest records in the field.