In fewer than two weeks, Ahmad Chalabi will become one of the most powerful men in the new democratic Iraq. Think about how improbable that statement would have sounded only last May, when Americans and Iraqis raided his home and confiscated his family Koran along with his computer hard drives. The Iraqi leader’s premature obituary was perhaps best captured in Newsweek when his photograph graced the cover behind a glass frame shattered by the raiding party.

But it is true. Mr. Chalabi’s name is the 10th on the list of candidates of the coalition of Shiite parties expected to win the lion’s share of seats in a transitional assembly. That body will write Iraq’s constitution and choose its leaders. During his months out of power, Mr. Chalabi strengthened bonds with the two major Kurdish parties, Shiite clerics, and tribal leaders, and he maintained back channels (through his nephew Salem Chalabi) with the American-appointed regime from which he was excluded. In the coming weeks, when retail politics will matter inside Iraq’s new congress, Mr. Chalabi will be at the center of the deals and alliances that will form the country’s first elected government. In short, he will be Iraq’s kingmaker.

The fate of his old rival in exile, Iyad Allawi, appears likely to be less kind. The current Iraqi prime minister could not even get his name on the ballot with the Kurdish or Shiite slate of candidates. Today he is scrambling to bribe constituencies with promises of future spending from a government he will not control in two weeks. He has even reportedly handed out $100 bills to Arab journalists in exchange for favorable coverage, a cheap tactic more becoming of, say, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak than a man standing in a free election.

The ascendancy of Mr. Chalabi ought to worry the CIA and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the two parties that empowered Mr. Allawi last spring. These two increasingly indistinguishable organizations are largely responsible for advising President Bush to cut ties with Mr. Chalabi. A Jordanian court filed new charges against the Iraqi leader last month claiming that he was a conspirator in the August 2003 attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. The CIA was the lead agency tasked with marginalizing Mr. Chalabi last April, when the National Security Council allegedly discovered that it was Mr. Chalabi who informed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that America had penetrated a military communications channel.

By the lights of Amman and Langley, Mr. Chalabi is not only a crook, but also a wildly unpopular crook with no future in Iraqi politics. How could the intelligence agency of the most powerful nation on the planet and the king of Iraq’s most influential neighbor be so wrong?

One answer is that by campaigning against him, Jordan’s monarchy and America’s spies gave Mr. Chalabi the legitimacy they insisted he lacked. Mr. Allawi, the CIA, and Jordan favored a strategy that essentially purchased Iraqi security through buying off many of the functionaries of the old Baathist regime. At the time, this rapprochement was sold as the only viable strategy for placating the violent Sunni terrorists who have declared war against the right to vote of their countrymen.

But in the rehabilitation of the Baath Party, many Iraqis became enraged at the prospect of returning to tyranny. It was Mr. Allawi who sent envoys to Syria in August to meet with senior leaders of the insurgency and invited a reconstituted Baath Party to help plan the elections Iraq will hold on January 30. One reason why proceedings of the special court to try Saddam Hussein stopped almost entirely during this period was out of concern it would further incite the decapitators, assassins, and car bombers.

In this political environment, Mr. Chalabi needed only to ask people to judge him by his enemies. If he was hated before because of his close ties to America’s corrupt occupation, his absence from the interim regime that took power last June was the key to his rehabilitation.

To be sure, Mr. Chalabi is no saint. When he was a close ally of the Coalition Provisional Authority, he surrounded himself in some cases with thugs who bullied bureaucrats at the Finance Ministry. His dealings with Iranian intelligence made it nearly impossible for his friends in Washington to defend him back in May. It would have been nice had he defended Mithal al-Alusi more vocally when an Iraqi court threatened to imprison him for visiting Israel.

But for all of his faults, President Bush should be pleased that Mr. Chalabi will be in a position to influence the new Iraq. Four years ago, when Mr. Chalabi was still trying to persuade official Washington to topple Saddam Hussein, he gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where he described decades of American policy in the Middle East as nothing more than “managing people with dictators.”

The dictators and their enablers failed miserably in trying to defeat Mr. Chalabi. The fact that his star is rising again is a victory for the president and his doctrine.