We have now in close proximity Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article about State Department and CIA efforts to influence the Iraqi elections this January and a New York Times story that reeks of State Department influence about how Ahmad Chalabi is trying to get Iraqi law enforced by removing Baathists from the team prosecuting Saddam Hussein. These articles are a window into the operative American policy in Baghdad. I say “operative policy” rather than “real policy” because the president is entitled to have the policy that he chooses and announces called the “real U.S. policy,” even if he does not succeed in securing the support of the diplomatic and intelligence professionals in Baghdad.

The operative policy has been based on the “professional” judgment that democracy could not succeed in Iraq, and would produce undesirable instability if it did. The professionals believed that protecting regional stability by protecting the Sunni Arab dictatorships that had controlled the region for more than a generation was the main American goal in Iraq, and that this goal required somehow bringing an authoritarian Sunni regime to power.

These supposed “realists” in American headquarters thought that they could install the 20% of Iraqis who were Sunnis in power against the 60% of the population that are Shiites. The real reason to go on this fool’s errand was that an Iraqi Shiite government was felt as a threat by the Sunni dictatorships our Arabists were familiar with and felt should be protected. The reason given was that the Shiites were controlled by and would support the Iranian Shiites (although they had fought loyally for Iraq in the war against Iran). The same professional establishment that has been insisting for years that we must deal with Iran by “engaging” it treats Iranian influence in Iraq as so dangerous that America must deny Iraqi reality by trying to help Sunnis limit Shiite power in Iraq.

The result is that America made it more difficult for the mainstream of Iraqi Shiites who want to stand against Iranian domination to resist Iranian influence through parties such as SCIRI and Dawa. America helped protect Sunni violence against Shiites and Saddam’s Baathist collaborators, instead of standing for law and democracy. The result was to reduce American influence with the Shiite majority and to strengthen the Iranian hand in Iraq.

Of course, Mr. Hersh’s reporting is not reliable, but along comes the New York Times presentation of the Baghdad professionals’ line against Mr. Chalabi for insisting on enforcing the law in relation to the team prosecuting Saddam. This State Department effort is part of the same policy that Mr. Hersh describes, however imperfectly. Since the case for keeping the Baathists that the America-dominated Iraqi government installed on the prosecution team is weak, the main thrust of the argument that John Burns puts forward in the Times is personal attacks on Deputy Prime Minister Chalabi – although he is by far the most powerful and effective Iraqi political leader supporting democracy and independence.

The sneers about Mr. Chalabi – he is “frustrated” because his nephew was dismissed as executive director of the tribunal, he has formed an alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr, he was dropped by the Americans for deceiving them and giving secrets to Iran, and he “lacks a popular following in Iraq” – are parts of the familiar State Department/CIA line against the most powerful adversary of their effort to prevent a democratic majority-led government from being created by the Iraqis in Iraq.

America’s Arabist professionals in Baghdad apparently haven’t noticed that since Mr. al-Sadr’s “alliance” with Mr. Chalabi, Mr. al-Sadr accepted the election and hasn’t been making the kind of trouble he was making before. Nor have they noticed that Mr. Chalabi is the principal figure, after Ayatollah Sistani, standing against the Iranian domination of the SCIRI and Dawa parties. Nor do they seem to have understood that all Iraqi politicians – Kurds and Arabs – have to take Iranian power and influence into account since Iran is several times larger than Iraq with a long border, and has an extremely powerful and sophisticated presence in Iraq. The real game in Iraqi politics is the nuanced game of playing with Iran and its agents without becoming dominated by them. American obtuseness makes this tightrope walk much more difficult for those whose goals match the president’s.

Nor have our foreign service officers and intelligence operatives noticed that the key to political health in Iraq – and to the defeat of the terrorist campaign there – is the removal from power of all those who were serious Baathists or who are still trying to preserve some of the power they gained from Saddam’s Baathist regime to fight against a new pluralist regime of law and minority rights in Iraq.

We stand a much better chance of winning in Iraq if we can convince our diplomats and intelligence officers to switch sides and to support the Iraqi majority trying to establish a regime of law and democracy, and to drop our support for the friends of Sunni Arab dictators and for Baathists. Iraqis know how to include patriotic Sunnis in their politics and government without advice or interference from America.

Mr. Singer, a senior fellow and founder of the Hudson Institute, has been writing about Iraq for some years and visited Baghdad twice in 2003. He is the author of “The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of Turmoil” (with Aaron Wildavsky).