Prime Minister al-Maliki will unveil, following the slaying of al-Qaeda’s Zarqawi, new details of Iraq’s national reconciliation process. That comes against the backdrop of Mr. al-Maliki’s decision last week to release some 2,500 Sunni political prisoners and his naming of a Sunni defense minister and a Shiite interior minister, unconnected to ethnic militias. Our war planners are now citing these hard compromises – more so than the killing of al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq – as cause for optimism.

We have a certain reserve about this. It’s one thing to try to dismantle the ethnic armies that are filling Baghdad’s morgues with the bodies of civilians. It’s one thing to seek reconciliation between the country’s ethnic factions. But the gushing over these gestures echoes the hosannas that greeted Secretary Rice’s bow to Iran. Iraq’s leaders have invited its country’s saboteurs into the tent of government almost since Paul Bremer announced the demolition of Saddam’s parasitic army.

It was on Mr. Bremer’s watch that we briefly placed a Saddam-era general, Jasim Mohammed Saleh, in charge of Falluja, where he paraded with his Ba’athist uniform and medals. Under Prime Minister Allawi’s brief regime in 2004, former Ba’athist colonels and generals were hired into the state’s new intelligence service and police by his hand picked intelligence chief, Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani.

Only seven months ago, in Cairo, there was a meeting between Iraq’s elected legislators and the representatives of terrorists who had been seeking to kill them. And just as the Arab League had been pressing for this “reconciliation” in December, they are now involving themselves with yet another conference to bring “all sides” together.

None of these dialogues and initiatives has halted the work of the car bombers and saboteurs. But there is a larger problem. The most destructive elements of the insurgency, the foreign Jihadists and the former death squads of what is known as the Fedayeen Saddam, cannot not be reasoned with. Their goal is to dissolve the experiment that has empowered Prime Minister al-Maliki and his new cabinet and to further foment a fratricide among Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

The existence of an ethnic civil war snuffs out the real goal of a free and democratic Iraq. Re-inviting the leaders and spokesmen of those who have sought from the beginning to plunge Iraq into this hellish kind of war holds out the impression that an amnesty or reprieve from the forces of civilization may yet await them. Better these barbarians remember the Nazi peace-seeker, Hess. When he parachuted into Britain, he was imprisoned – and he died in prison decades later.

It’s not the business of these columns to advise the Iraqi premier. But there are plenty of people who can be reasoned with. The slaying of Zarqawi has provided an opportunity to parley with the heads of the ethnic militias, the Sunni clerics who cheered Zarqawi’s death, and the Kurdish politicians who fear a powerful military may be used again to crush them. There are leaders with legitimate grievances but who are nonetheless committed to a pluralistic Iraq, the eventual rule of law, and elections.

What one cannot imagine is a parley with the agents of the foreign powers committed to ethnic cleansing and the collapse of the very government issuing the invitations going out this week. With these factions even the idea of negotiations holds its own kind of danger. This is why our guard goes up at when the leadership starts talking about the concept of reconciliation. The first thing that needs to be done is for the enemy to be vanquished, lest this war be extended indefinitely, widened, and turned into a template for wider war elsewhere.