As you read this, Iraqi politicians in Baghdad are meeting to fix or unfix the national parliamentary election from last Thursday. On Monday, the country’s election commission released the preliminary vote totals and it appeared that nearly every Shiite voter cast ballots for a list of theocrats known as the United Iraqi Alliance.

With the defection of Ahmad Chalabi to run his own slate of candidates, which fared poorly, the United Iraqi Alliance is now bereft of any Shiite liberals. And if the preliminary results stick, the alliance will likely hold its dominant position in the next parliament. Meanwhile, almost everyone else now is claiming they were robbed. Thaer al-Nakib, an aide to former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, vaguely threatened Wednesday to “take to the streets,” if the election commission was not abolished and a new vote was not called. As I reported Tuesday, a former debaathification official, Mithal al-Alusi, says his monitors were threatened and one of his candidates almost murdered.

There are reports that tens of thousands of votes in key districts disappeared or were declared fraudulent by the election commission and thus did not figure into the preliminary totals. But at the same time, these last minute negotiations do not change the fact that many Iraqis likely did vote for sectarian religious parties, proving that in a war and without the backing of a neighboring state, it’s politically perilous to be a secular liberal in Iraq.

All of this bad news will likely brighten the moods of war critics who were so quick to dismiss last Thursday’s elections and the unprecedented participation of Sunni Arabs as nothing particularly important. They will no doubt take particular delight in the failings of Ahmad Chalabi, a man who has fought for these elections since 1991.

One can already hear the sneers now: Iran won the war America started. As columnist for the Nation, Robert Scheer, wrote this week, “It is absurd for Bush to assert that the election ‘means that America has an ally of growing strength in the fight against terror,’ ignoring how he has ‘lost’ Iraq to the influence and model of ‘Axis of Evil’ Iran.”

There is a kernel of truth in this hyperbole. The United Iraqi Alliance that did best is composed of al-Dawa, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and politicians loyal to Ayatollah Muqtada al-Sadr. The first two were trained and funded for years in exile by Iran’s revolutionary guard, and the last one is led by an apocalyptic and anti-American cleric. Incidentally, the militias affiliated with these parties have launched an undeclared war in recent months on Sunni civilians.

Iran will almost certainly use its influence with the politicians it helped train to break Iraq apart. The regime’s revolutionary guard has been caught red handed in bringing new improvised explosive devices into the country. After both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, terrorists were able to escape the field of battle through Iran’s borders. And last week, the New York Times reported that a truck filled with phony ballots was intercepted from Iran trying to enter Iraq.

But the surest path to Iran’s victory in Iraq is to follow the advice of the so-called progressives who have since 2001 embraced the foreign policy of the president’s father. The “realist”-left alliance in America and Europe have for some time been calling for America to withdraw from Iraq. And while they are right to be outraged by the recent revenge killings of the Shiite militias, it’s important to remember that American soldiers helped bust up the secret prisons of the interior ministry.

When it comes to Iran, the critics advocate a patient and insane diplomacy with a country whose president just imposed a ban on western pop music and has spent the last two months talking about his fervent wish to destroy the state of Israel. It is this preservationist path that the war critics promise will curb Iran’s ambition to build an A-bomb and perhaps entice their terrorists to allow a democracy in Iraq to bloom.

Sadly, the administration has followed this advice when it comes to Iran. The only people who did not get the memo to work with Iran are the president’s speechwriters. And while the president sounds tough when he warns the mullahs against meddling in Iraq, his spies and diplomats have tried to work with Iran since the liberation.

Perhaps now it is time to try a new approach. With Iraq on the verge of being lost, it would be nice if the president could start encouraging Iraq’s secular liberals to unify and take advantage of some of the recent moves of the Iranian opposition to do the same. Earlier this month, envoys from many Iranian opposition parties met in Brussels to discuss a new campaign to press for a constitutional referendum that would defang the clerics that have stolen their country. President Bush might then want to ask the winners in the Iraqi election to choose between their country and Iran.