WASHINGTON — American and Iraqi power politics are intertwining this week with Iraq’s prime minister lashing out against Senator Clinton and other American officials who “consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages,” urging them to “come to their senses.”

Mrs. Clinton last week backpedaled on her tepid endorsement of the military surge in Baghdad after being challenged by the John Edwards campaign. She pointed out that any military successes had failed to spur the government of Prime Minister al-Maliki to reach a political compact with leaders of other factions.

In a written statement on Wednesday she also said she agreed with Senator Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that Iraq’s parliament should replace Mr. Maliki when they return for business in September.

Mr. Maliki’s criticism was not restricted to Mrs. Clinton. In his remarks yesterday, he criticized American raids into the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, where some 1 million Shiite Iraqis live in an area named for the grandfather of a radical anti-American cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.

“Concerning American raids on Shula and Sadr City, there were big mistakes committed in these operations. The terrorist himself should be targeted not his family,” Mr. Maliki said, according to the Associated Press.

Mr. Maliki also criticized the American practice of detaining suspected terrorists. He said, according to the Associated Press, “When they want to detain one person, they should not kill 10 others. These are mistakes which we have to deal with. We will not allow the detaining of innocent people. Only the criminals should be detained.”

These remarks are potentially damaging to the presentation scheduled to be delivered next month by General David Petraeus, who is expected to tout the successes of the military campaign in making neighborhoods in Baghdad safer.

Mr. Maliki last week traveled to Syria, a nation President Bush has said is facilitating the travel of suicide bombers into Iraq, and warned the White House that he can find foreign support elsewhere if America turns on him.

Mr. Maliki has walked a fine line in the last two weeks. Iran’s Foreign Ministry says that Mr. Maliki, during a recent visit to Tehran, invited President Ahmadinejad to Baghdad for a state visit, a meeting that would inflame Sunni politicians already boycotting Mr. Maliki’s government. Messrs. Maliki and Ahmadinejad are both Shiite Muslims.

Yet yesterday, Mr. Maliki announced that the Sunni vice president, Tariq al-Ramadan, had agreed in principle to join a unified Shiite-Kurdish bloc announced earlier this month as a possible new ruling coalition. Details on the new coalition, however, are sketchy.

Baghdad has been buzzing for the last 10 days with talk that the CIA and powerful American politicians quietly favor replacing the Shiite-led government of Mr. Maliki with one led by Iyad Allawi, the prime minister chosen by the former U.N. liaison to Iraq’s government, Lakhdar Brahimi, in June 2004.

Mr. Allawi, who is a secular Shiite, still counts most of his support among Iraq’s educated less religious Sunni population. He has long-standing ties to Saudi Arabia as well as the British MI6 and CIA, for whom he worked as an opposition leader following the end of the first Gulf War.

On Saturday, Mr. Allawi’s Iraqi National List withdrew from the government, a possible signal that he will openly audition for the job. CNN reported last week that Mr. Allawi had hired the Washington-based lobbying firm of Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, for six months at a fee of $300,000. That firm employs the former White House aide who helped launch Mr. Allawi into power in 2004, Robert Blackwill. Mr. Blackwill, while working for the American government, was said to have drafted a memo calling for the marginalization of Mr. Allawi’s former rival in the opposition, Ahmad Chalabi. Also on the payroll of Mr. Barbour’s lobbying firm is Philip Zelikow, a former senior counselor to Secretary of State Rice.

Mr. Maliki is not the only one questioning Mrs. Clinton’s judgment. Over the weekend, President Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said Mrs. Clinton’s rival for her party’s presidential nomination, Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois, had the “upper hand” in their disagreements on foreign affairs.

While Mr. Brzezinski is still disliked among many American Republicans for his role in an administration that oversaw the Iranian hostage crisis between 1979 and 1981, the former mentor of Madeleine Albright has enjoyed a revival in his reputation among the Democratic Party’s left flank.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Mr. Brzezinski said, “The senator from New York talks in very conventional terms and I don’t think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago. I think there is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs and Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America’s relationship with the world.”