pieces of silver

Ahmad Chalabi is openly declaring that he thinks he will be the ultimate victor in the Iraq elections. Considering he was pretty discredited in the last year and was never a favorite of the Iraqis to begin with, it seems strange that he would be popular enough to be this close to winning the vote. There are reports that he has largely bribed his way and used various other means of achieving his current revitalization, begging the question of where he got sufficient resources to be able to accomplish this in such a short time. With Chalabi's obvious connection to the Bush administration and the fact that under Bremer's good stewardship, some nine billion dollars are unaccounted for in the financing of Iraq's "reconstruction" does it not seem reasonable to assume there might be some connection between the two?