Recognizing the free Iraqi opposition led by Ahmad Chalabi as the provisional government of Iraq has been a good idea from the moment we first heard it, back in the mid-1990s. Had America done it back then, it would have given the Iraqi opposition access to certain oil revenues and frozen assets that would have helped the Iraqis themselves to defeat Saddam. America’s failure to follow that strategy is one of the reasons there are now hundreds of thousands of American troops fighting a dangerous war in Iraq.

So it is with some interest that we noticed a dispatch yesterday at the Web site of U.S. News. The magazine’s Bruce Auster reported that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld sent a memo on Wednesday to President Bush. “It called for the president to ask Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, to announce” that the free Iraqi opposition is in charge of the country, the dispatch said. It said the interim authority would include the Iraqi National Congress-led by Mr. Chalabi.

Every sign so far is that the sooner Mr. Bush moves to involve Iraqis like Mr. Chalabi in the war effort, the more successful the effort will be. In Najaf, where the 101 st Airborne was welcomed so enthusiastically this week, it was accompanied by a translator working with an Iraqi opposition group, according to a report by U.S. News’s Julian Barnes.

The immediate creation and recognition of a provisional government would make it clear to the world and to the Iraqi people that America is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi people as a liberator, not as an occupier or invader. And if Saddam or his henchmen feel the need to react by emerging in public to challenge the new provisional government’s legitimacy — well, it strikes us as an apt way to flush the villains out of their holes.