One of the real dangers, David, is that as politics takes hold in Iraq, whether or not the civilian government will keep intact the military structure that we’re now helping them develop. And my message to the prime minister and our message throughout government to the Iraqis is, keep stability; don’t disrupt the training that has gone on – don’t politicize your military – in other words, have them there to help secure the people.

– President Bush, April 28, 2005

President Bush telling the new prime minister of Iraq “don’t politicize your military” is kind of like if Prime Minister Blair had held a press conference the day before the American inauguration and said, “Congratulations on your re-election victory, President Bush. Don’t try to get private accounts as part of Social Security.”

It would have been outrageous. Because, first of all, it contradicts what the election was about. And second, because it’s Mr. Bush’s domestic agenda; it’s none of Mr. Blair’s business. Imagine if George Washington was stuck trying to fight the British with an army that was 70% Tories, and if he had been trying to get them out of the army and make sure that his army was full of patriots loyal to the cause. No one would have accused him of trying improperly to politicize the army.

Yet that’s a situation similar to the one that Iraq’s newly elected leaders find themselves in. People working in the army and security apparatus clock in during the day for the new Iraqi government, then head off after work to their paymasters, the Baathist remnant of Saddam Hussein loyalists funded and encouraged by Syria and Saudi Arabia. Treating this as a nonpolitical matter is absurd – it is a political matter, the politics of the matter being the very cause for which the Iraqis are fighting.

To put it in the American context, it’s not as if Mr. Bush were demanding that all American troops be Republicans or as if Senator Clinton were demanding that they all be Democrats. The new Iraqi government’s insistence on a de-Baathified, loyal army is like Mr. Bush and Mrs. Clinton together insisting that the American Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines not include any Al Qaeda sympathizers. Or Washington wanting patriots, not Benedict Arnolds, as his officers and soldiers. It makes perfect sense.

The most effective army believes in the cause it is fighting for. Otherwise, it is merely a group of mercenaries. At some deep level, Mr. Bush surely understands this from the many hours he has spent himself with the American troops and by the tremendous victories those troops have achieved under his leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But with dozens of innocent Iraqis dying in almost daily bombings in Iraq, the last thing Mr. Bush should want to be doing is to prevent the new Iraqi leadership from gaining control of the security situation by creating a loyal army. It’s often silly to second-guess a commander on tactical matters in a war. Mr. Bush’s overall record has been heroic. But on this one, Mr. Bush is the one who is second-guessing the elected leaders of Iraq, who now have a democratic mandate to take the steps necessary to restore order.