It’s too soon to say whether Ahmad Chalabi will be successful in his bid to gain a mandate from the new parliament in Baghdad to become the first prime minister of the new democratic government of Iraq. In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Chalabi told our Washington leg, Eli Lake, that he had been sounded out for the post as a parliament takes shape in which the final vote tally will most likely give the United Iraqi Alliance, of which Mr. Chalabi is a part, a numeric majority. But it’s not too soon to say that Mr. Chalabi appears nearly certain to play some kind of important role in the new democratic government.

That in and of itself is an extraordinary development in this roller-coaster ride of nation building. Only months ago, Mr. Chalabi was being written off by the political establishment here in America. The man who played a key role in winning passage of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 by a nearly unanimous vote in the United States Congress was, as recently as May, being mocked in the editorials of the New York Times as a man who has “no genuine political base” and as a symbol of all the “disastrous blunders” of the war.

We remember Mr. Chalabi when he would spend weeks in Washington, walking the halls of Congress to line up support for the 1998 legislation that made regime change in Iraq the official policy of our government. At that time Washington’s foreign policy elite, men like the commander of U.S. Central Command, General Anthony Zinni, dismissed Mr. Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress as “Gucci Guerillas.” An influential 1999 article in Foreign Affairs, co-authored by President Clinton’s Iraq policy point man, Kenneth Pollack, called Mr. Chalabi’s plan to take on Saddam Hussein’s military “an Iraqi Bay of Pigs.”

When the Bush administration in 2002 finally did get serious about toppling Saddam Hussein, the State Department launched an audit of INC funds, which it promptly leaked to the press. It pushed a plan to turn the Iraqi opposition into a constellation of four parties that pointedly excluded Mr. Chalabi. Yet a few months later, Mr. Chalabi was at the center of the deals being made for what he hoped would be the interim government in Baghdad after the coalition forces routed the Baath military. Mr. Chalabi and other rebels went to northern Iraq in January of 2003 and began organizing a government they hoped would shepherd their country from occupation to elections.

The White House never accepted the largely exile government those meetings created. Instead, Mr. Bush decided to create an American occupation authority and appoint Iraqis to run ministries and a council to rubber stamp the dictates from his proconsul in Baghdad. State offered Mr. Chalabi the post of deputy finance minister, a position he promptly turned down. Mr. Chalabi’s star never fully rose within the Coalition Provisional Authority, in part because most of the officials staffing it were drawn from the bureaucracies that opposed him in Washington.

Then, in May 2004, American and Iraqi soldiers raided his home, taking his family’s Koran, smashing his portrait, and confiscating his computer. In Washington word leaked that it was Mr. Chalabi who burned America’s penetration of Iran’s encrypted military communication channels. Dark rumors were circulated around the fact that Mr. Chalabi has long been in contact with Iran’s ruling mullahs. About this time, the Hashemite king, Abdullah, spun Mr. Bush against Mr. Chalabi.

Vice President Gore and Senator Biden joined in the maligning of Mr. Chalabi, without mentioning that it was Mr. Clinton who signed the Iraq Liberation Act. Secretary of State Powell chimed in with a similar line of derision. The blogosphere erupted against the Iraqi idealist who had done so much to launch the dream of a democratic Iraq. The liberal magazines went into a frenzy of derogatory writing about Mr. Chalabi, and even some of his longtime backers and admirers began to fall away, save for The Wall Street Journal, Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, and a few others of us who remembered a different Mr. Chalabi. So while it may be too soon to tell how it’s all going to work out, it’s not too soon to say that if Mr. Chalabi does accede either at the head of the new government or merely as a leading figure in the new parliament, these columns will not be the least surprised. Or the least disappointed.