The Missing Partner in Iraq

The one crucial assumption behind everything President Bush proposed on Iraq last week was that Washington would have the wholehearted support of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. None of Mr. Bush’s ideas — his plan to send more American soldiers to fight alongside Iraqi units in Baghdad, his program for jump-starting the Iraqi economy, his hope of reconciling rival sectarian communities and heading off civil war — can possibly succeed without the full cooperation of the Iraqi government.

Yet in the days following Mr. Bush’s address, as in the days before, Mr. Maliki has demonstrated how far his own goals diverge from America’s best interests or any reasonable path for containing Iraq’s civil war. Consider, for example, Mr. Maliki’s designation of Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar — a Shiite officer known for his combative resistance to American tutelage — to be the overall military commander of the new Baghdad security drive.

Any hope that this campaign will prove more effective than past failed efforts depends on soldiers’ being able to finally move against Shiite militias. If General Qanbar and Mr. Maliki plan to continue shielding militias like the Mahdi Army, this new drive will be doomed before it begins.

What another failure would mean was underscored in a particularly grim way yesterday when the United Nations reported that some 34,000 Iraqi civilians died violently last year, a staggering number in a country of less than 27 million people. Yesterday, more than 100 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone.

Consider also the grisly decapitation over the weekend of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s co-defendant and half brother. Two weeks of watching how the lynch mob atmosphere of Mr. Hussein’s execution instantly turned a monster into a martyr throughout the Sunni Arab world should have put Mr. Maliki on notice to get this one right. But whether deliberately or through breathtaking incompetence, the Iraqi government did not get it right, once again fanning sectarian flames.

Unless President Bush insists that Mr. Maliki accept specific and enforceable policy benchmarks and timelines — starting with the disarming of sectarian militias — the United States will remain hostage to the Iraqi prime minister and his radical Shiite agenda.

Mr. Bush needs to make clear to the Iraqi leader that continued American support will depend on his active cooperation. And that, ultimately, the Iraqis have even more to lose than the Americans from an unending civil war.