The head of the Iraqi National Accord, an anti-democratic opposition group with a record of unalloyed failure, was holed up until recently at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Tysons Corner, Va., just a short ride from CIA headquarters at Langley. So our Adam Daifallah reports at Page One today. A good question for Congress to start asking — in open hearings — is who paid for the hotel room. And if the answer is the American taxpayers — or, more specifically, the Central Intelligence Agency under Clinton holdover George Tenet, the hearing might proceed to the question, “Why?”

The feud between the factions of the Iraqi opposition too often is written off under the headline “Iraqi Opposition in Disarray.” It involves squabbling between opposition groups with names like the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party — the PUK and the KDP — and it is enough to make eyes glaze over among even the most ardent enthusiasts of regime change. But the mostly hidden hand at work here is the CIA, and from what we can tell, the role it has been playing is downright destructive. A more accurate headline for the stories would be “Bush Administration in Disarray.”

There exists an Iraqi opposition that understands the principles of freedom and democracy. It is called the Iraqi National Congress, it is led by Ahmad Chalabi, and it has deep and serious support at the highest levels of the Pentagon civilian leader ship, the American Congress, and the office of Vice President Cheney. The Iraqi National Accord, on the other hand, is composed of a motley assortment of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. The other CIA-favored opposition groups, the PUK and the KDP, could be helpful under the INC umbrella, but on their own are little more than vehicles for Kurdish warlords. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is a vehicle for the interests of the Axis of Evil regime in Iran.

President Bush learned some things at Harvard Business School, and one of them may be the value of letting different, even conflicting, ideas bubble up within an organization. It’s not necessary, even desirable, for all of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy advisers to give him the same advice. And it may be tempting for Mr. Bush, if he can’t decide which advisers to listen to, to compromise by putting several strategies in motion to defeat Saddam, and hoping that at least one of them will work.

But it strikes us that Mr. Bush’s tolerance of Mr. Tenet is starting to undercut the inspiring principles that Mr. Bush has, to his great credit, been enunciating publicly. It’s just terrific to hear Mr. Bush say, as he did yesterday, that he has a “deep desire” for “freedom for the Iraqi people.” But then he goes off to Iftar dinner at the White House with the ambassador of Syria. And when America’s Central Intelligence Agency is not-so-secretly funding the Baath Party bullies who are undermining the genuine freedom-fighters, the president’s words start to be greeted in the Arab world more with cynical snickering than with the soaring spirits they might otherwise inspire.