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“I know what I’m doing,” Bremer said brusquely. “There’s going to be some sort of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank you very much.”

But despite Bremer’s supreme confidence, things started to fall apart quickly. The Sunnis felt isolated and threatened, because they believed they were being shut out of the new Iraqi government. They started organizing military operations against coalition forces. At the same time, ideologically motivated Iraqi Islamists opened the door for foreign Arab jihadists. If anybody rejoiced at the chaos in Iraq after the American invasion, it was Al Qaeda, as they quickly realized that they could shift their operations from Afghanistan into the heart of the Arab world.

Although it is hard to determine the origin of these two policies—Bremer denied responsibility in his memoir and said they came from the White House—I believe the ideas originated from the Iraqi émigré politician Ahmad Chalabi and his supporters. When he lived in Jordan in the 1970s and 1980s, Chalabi was an active businessman and a close friend of Crown Prince Hassan. One of his most notorious ventures was the Petra Bank, founded in Jordan in 1977. In the late 1980s, the Petra Bank ran into financial trouble, and the government began to investigate, suspecting financial fraud. Investigators believed that Chalabi had been illegally taking funds from the bank. When they began closing in on him in 1989, he smuggled himself out of the country to Syria. He was tried in absentia and in 1992 was convicted of embezzling $70 million and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. There is still an active warrant for his arrest in Jordan. After he left, his name was connected with the controversy surrounding the collapse of a Lebanese bank and a financial institution in Switzerland.

After an unsuccessful career as a businessman, Chalabi tried his hand at politics. During the 1990s he was one of the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, the main opposition group dedicated to toppling Saddam Hussein. He was supported by the Clinton administration, and also became close to neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. When Bush came to office in 2001, Chalabi increased his efforts to push his ideas for influence and cash. He is said to have secured substantial amounts of both from the U.S. State and Defense departments.

I warned President Bush about Chalabi when I saw him in 2002, telling him that he was the worst person possible to be giving advice to the United States. Bush said that he would “deal with Chalabi.” But Chalabi’s star continued to rise.

Chalabi’s grandiose schemes may have been popular in Washington, but on the ground in Baghdad, a grim reality began to take hold. As one of the first Arab countries to reopen our embassy in Iraq, Jordan was soon drawn into the chaos. On August 7, 2003, a truck pulled up outside our embassy. As the driver walked away, the truck exploded, killing at least seventeen Iraqi civilians. None of our embassy staff were killed. Later investigation showed this to be a strike by the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would later become the leader of a new group called Al Qaeda in Iraq. In pursuit of a wider goal, Zarqawi and his followers wanted to ride on a tide of violence and brutality, and struck at Jordan to discourage others from helping the nascent Iraqi government.

The looming chaos in post-invasion Iraq called for a coordinated approach by all of its neighbors. And one neighbor in particular was positioning itself to play a dominant role in Iraq’s future. In early September 2003, I traveled to Tehran to meet with the Iranian leadership. This was the first trip to Iran by a Jordanian head of state since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. My father had been close to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and I remember visiting Tehran as a young teenager. We went to a holiday camp on the Caspian and explored the resort island of Kish, in the Arabian Gulf.

I remembered Tehran