The fighting over the past week in Iraq is a reminder that the problem can’t be dealt with in isolation. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld yesterday made a start toward putting it clearly when he said: “We know the Iranians have been meddling, and it’s unhelpful to have neighboring countries meddling in the affairs of Iraq. And I think the Iraqi people are not going to want to be dominated by a neighboring country — any neighboring country. No country wants to be dominated by its neighbors.”

“Meddling” puts the nicest possible face on it.”Murdering”would be more to the point, and it would have described what happened to the four American contractors who were burned and had their mangled bodies dragged through the streets and strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. As Michael Ledeen writes in the adjacent columns, Muqtada al-Sadr, a key figure in the anti-American violence in Iraq,”was formally appointed as the head of the Iraqi Hezbollah by leaders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”

Mr. Rumsfeld’s recognition yesterday is a start. The logical policy for President Bush is to hold accountable the neigh boring states, starting with Iran, that have been undermining the progress of freedom and democracy in Iraq. But it bears marking that Mr. Rumsfeld used the plural when he spoke of dominating neighbors. It’s not only the tyrants in Tehran, but also the Saudi Arabian and Syrian regimes that are desperate for America to fail in Iraq. For if freedom and democracy take hold in Iraq, then Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians will want freedom and democracy, too. The Iranians are particularly concerned because the influential Iraqi Shiite leader, Ayatollah Sistani, holds the traditional view that religious leaders should stay out of government. That idea threatens the Iranian theocracy.

For now the Iranian, Syrian, and Saudi forces, allied with remnants of Saddam Hussein’s loyalists and Al Qaeda, are concentrating their attacks on America and its allies, including free Iraqis, inside Iraq. That is bad enough.

But we have no doubt that they intend to attack us here on American soil as well. America won’t be safe until we press the war on terror to its full conclusion — not just in Iraq, but in, as Mr. Rumsfeld put it, “neighboring countries” as well.