No one left to bamboozle?

What happened here exactly? In recent months there was a new storyline afoot. Whatever his previous hijinks, whatever lack of a constituency he may have had in pre-invasion Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi, through shmoozing and patronage and guile, had managed to make himself into a political force to be reckoned with in the new Iraq. It even seemed possible he might emerge as a compromise candidate for Prime Minister in the new government.

Apparently, it just wasn't meant to be.

NBC reports that Chalabi got less than 1% of the vote in his sometimes country. And the article at the MSNBC website contains some choice schadenfreudious electoral nuggets.

Out 2.5 million votes cast in Baghdad, Chalabi clocked in at a rather anemic 8,645 votes. Anbar province, the center of the Sunni insurgency, was never going to be Chalabi's base. But you'd have thought there might be more than 113 voters who'd vote for the guy. The list on: Basra, .34 percent of the vote.

So what happened? Was there really any reason to believe that Chalabi would do substantially better than this feeble result?