The strangest bedfellows

EACH DAY'S NEWS from Iraq highlights a veiled reality: that American and Iranian interests overlap there significantly. Iran, which has influence on the main Shi'ite factions in Iraq, has declared it will take part in talks with the United States about ways to bring stability to Iraq. Yet neither Iran nor the Bush administration is eager to acknowledge publicly that they need each other to help prevent a full-scale civil war in Iraq.

Nonetheless, this need explains the pirouette the two governments had to perform when they agreed to discussions about Iraq. The US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who is to conduct the talks with Iranian interlocutors, has had to declare that the agenda will be confined strictly to Iraq and that instead of engaging in a negotiator's give-and-take, he will simply demand that Iran cease arming Iraqi Shi'ite militias and transporting Al Qaeda operatives into Iraq.

Obviously, if this were the exclusive content of the talks, there would be no talks. The clerical regime in Iran does not need a direct encounter with Khalilzad to discover what it is about their meddling in Iraq that displeases Washington.

An American-Iranian dialogue about Iraq can only have meaning if it is premised on the need for reciprocal actions.

The starting point for such a cooperative rescue operation in Iraq must be an overt admission that the sectarian civil war now brewing there portends a nightmare for both Iran and the United States. In the past month, more than 100 Iraqis a day appear to have been victims of blind revenge killings -- Shi'ites being murdered simply for being Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs for being Sunni.

President Bush already seems a feckless sorcerer's apprentice to much of the world because of the radical disorder his blunders have helped induce in Iraq. But the current sectarian purging of neighborhoods and villages could yet turn much worse. In the extreme case, the government Khalilzad is trying to help knit together would not be able to prevent a complete dissolution of the Iraqi state.

And, as Khalilzad has warned, Iraq's neighbors would then be sorely tempted to intervene, if not with uniformed armed forces then with irregular proxies.

This prospect would not only signify a complete collapse of Bush's much-trumpeted vision of democratization in Iraq and the surrounding region, it would bring a regional war between Shi'ites and Sunnis to Iran's doorstep.

The Americans can go home when that war starts. Iran cannot. So no matter how spiteful Iran's leaders may be toward the United States, it is in their vital national interest to help the United States save Iraq from the disasters that now threaten.