The most important man in Iraq is someone of whom most Americans have never heard. He is not the general, David Patraeus, whom President Bush sent to Baghdad to win the war his wise men said could not be won. He is not Prime Minister Maliki, whose commitment to a unified Iraq Mr. Bush’s national security adviser questioned in a leaked memo last winter. Nor is he the ethnic cleansing cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who has not shown his head in Baghdad since February.

Meet Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, the Sheikh who leads the Anbar Salvation Front. The front, a model now being emulated in Diyala and other provinces, could — if it works —win the war. It is an affiliation of 42 local tribal chiefs dedicated to expelling al-Qaeda from Iraq. As opposed to the other Sunni Iraqi leaders, who spent the last four years trying to broker deals between the Americans and the less pious terrorists devoted to destroying any government that failed to reflect the Ba’athist fiction that Sunni Arabs are a majority in Iraq, the Anbar Salvation Front is coordinating its counter-terrorism with both the Marines and the elected government.

Mr. al-Rishawi agreed this month to participate in a counter-terrorism task force after Mr. Maliki personally paid him a visit in Ramadi. He also pledged allegiance to the Shiite led government and the office of the prime minister.

One officer correspondent tells me that if elections were held this week in Anbar, the salvation front would sweep out the current lot representing the citizens of Fallujah and Ramadi. That’s a good thing, considering that two of these legislators last year, Khalaf al-Ayan and Saleh Mutlaq, allegedly approached the Central Intelligence Agency about mounting a coup to topple the government.

Part of Mr. al-Rishawi’s appeal is that he has lost most of his family to al-Qaeda. This has been written about in a careful February 27 dispatch from of William Roggio, which is accessible at http://billroggio.com/archives/2007/02/alqaeda_on_sunni_vio.php. Like the non-sectarian legislator, Mithal al Alusi, who lost his two sons in 2005, the threats and attacks on Mr. al-Rishawi’s family appears to have made the sheikh only more determined to rescue his country from these saboteurs.

As he told the AP’s Todd Pittman on March 25, “I was always against these terrorists . . . They brainwashed people into thinking Americans were against them. They said foreigners wanted to occupy our land and destroy our mosques. They told us, ‘We’ll wage a jihad. We’ll help you defeat them.'”

The strategic significance of a Sunni Arab leader saying these words cannot be overestimated. Anbar Province was a home base for al-Qaeda before General Patraeus arrived in Baghdad. While the suicide bombs have not yet halted, the new salvation front has forced the terrorists to regroup in nearby Diyala province. If Mr. al-Rishawi can emulate what he did in Anbar to Diyala, no easy feat, al-Qaeda will find it has few friends left among the confessional constituency it claims to represent.

The Sheikh from Ramadi’s organization is not pristine. Some of his top lieutenants have American and Iraqi blood on their hands. They are composed of the early Ba’athist insurgent groups that were left out of al-Qaeda’s consolidation of power this fall. Yet in a vacuum of power, they sided with the Americans.

To most Democrats, Mr. al-Rishawi should not exist. We have, according to this crowd, lost our chance to persuade the Iraqi people that we can protect them. Thus we have no choice but to betray them to those forces who are already there, whether they are the house to house executioners of the Iranian-inspired Mahdi Army or the recruiters of adolescent truck-bombers of al-Qaeda. The genie is out of the bottle.

For a while, it looked like the second-guessers were correct. The words of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, slow to recognize there was even an insurgency, rang ever more hollow as the corpses of politicians, civilians and soldiers mounted. As honest critics and proponents of the war have to admit today, much of the sectarian division of Iraq has already happened.

But in the logic of the withdraw-and-betray caucus, the dissolution of Iraq is solely the fault of the Americans, the invaders. But many forces have invaded and infiltrated Iraq, and unlike American soldiers, are interested only in prolonging the fratricide and insuring the country’s dissolution.

Mr. al-Rishawi’s enemies in Anbar have benefited from a global network whose spiritual and tactical leaders reside in Waziristan, Pakistan. They receive cash from dummy bank accounts in allied capitals like Amman, Jordan.

Hundreds of volunteer “martyrs” are, before they infiltrate Iraq, indoctrinated in camps just over the border in Syria. An Egyptian satellite provider, Nilesat, is the primary carrier for al-Zawraa, the station that only until five weeks ago was broadcasting the propaganda of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Cash and weapons for both sides of this war have been provided by Iran’s Quds Force and Revolutionary Guard.

This is not to say that Mr. al-Rishawi is not fighting Iraqis in Anbar. Rather it is to recognize that those Iraqis he seeks to destroy are fighting for the agenda of foreign powers. Too bad the reality-based community here can’t see that for itself.