It may be that President George W. Bush's mounting of the invasion of Iraq to achieve his reelection as a war president in 2004 was the worst thing he did to America.

What might turn out to be even worse in the long run is the failure so far of President Barack Obama to get us out of there.

There are two developments under way right now which worry me endlessly about Iraq. The first is the catastrophic error the Obama administration made in linking America's troop withdrawal schedule to Iraq's completion of its parliamentary elections.

Those elections initially were scheduled for Jan. 16. The Iraqi parliament fooled around with passing the country's electoral law, with each faction seeking to manipulate the rules to favor its prospects. (Any resemblance between the Iraqi parliament dealing with the electoral law and the U. S. Congress fiddling with health-care legislation is coincidental.)

The result of the Iraqi maneuvering was that the elections had to be postponed to March 7, where they stand now. Of course, given the logic of the Iraqis -- and perhaps of the U.S. military, as well -- the commencement of the U.S. troop withdrawal from the current level of 120,000 down to the 50,000 scheduled for August couldn't begin until after the elections.

Whatever the Iraqis' motivation, it is clear they engineered this delay on purpose. It seems inconceivable to us as Americans that some Iraqi elements would like to prolong the U.S. occupation of their country. On the other hand, some Iraqis are making big money from the U.S. presence.

It also is clear that a continued U.S. role there helps prolong the reign of the current Iraqi government, headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and his fellow Shiites. It isn't certain that there will be a night of the long knives for Iraqis who cooperated with the American occupation when the last U.S. forces pull out -- but it isn't clear that there won't be. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, with the helicopter taking off from a roof near the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as Vietnamese tried to climb aboard, is one of the more memorable moments in modern U.S. history.

The other election stunt the Maliki government recently performed was vetoing 499 parliamentary candidates from running in the March 7 elections.

To remind readers of the breakdown of the Iraqi population, roughly 60 percent are Shiites, 20 percent Sunnis and 20 percent Kurds. The Sunnis ran the place from independence in 1932 until the U.S. invasion in 2003.

The late president Saddam Hussein was a Sunni. When the United States insisted on one-person, one-vote democratic elections, the Shiites predictably won and Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, eventually became prime minister. The Shiites, not surprisingly, are concerned that when the Americans leave, the Sunnis will decide it is time for them to come back into their kingdom, by elections or otherwise.

For a while, the Sunnis basically boycotted post-invasion politics, cross that they had been pushed out of power by the Americans and the Shiites. The Americans finally convinced them that this was shortsighted and, through a combination of persuasion and putting them on the U.S. payroll, drew them back into the political process. One element of U.S. persuasion was arming Sunni militias. Somehow the idea of new arms and equipment was attractive to them. (One does have to look ahead.)

The best way to entice Iraqis into forming political parties or coalitions that cut across traditional Shiite-Sunni-Kurdish lines and improving prospects for a national unity government is to give representatives from all groups equal opportunity to become candidates.

Unfortunately, Mr. Maliki's government controlled the choice of the members of the Iraqi Election Commission, which took the opportunity to bar 499 candidates from running, many of them Sunnis, some of them the most senior Sunni politicians, such as Minister of Defense Abdul-Kader Jassem al-Obeidi.

The commission did this, first, because of traditional Shiite fear of Sunnis, in politics or anywhere else. Some of the Sunni politicians also were in the process of forming an alliance with one of Mr. Maliki's Shiite rivals, former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi.

Thus, with many of the Sunni candidates excluded, Iraq's 20 percent Sunnis will have less of a stake in the March 7 elections, before, during or after. They have showed in the past their ability to really turn things upside down if they are dealt out of the game.

A second phenomenon ongoing in Iraq, quite likely related to the electoral maneuvering, is an increase in violence across the country.

Recall that the 120,000 U.S. troops still there have withdrawn to the cities and Iraqi forces are in principle responsible for what takes place outside the cities. There are reports of assassinations, car bombs and fighting in Ramadi, Najaf and Diyala and Anbar provinces, as well as in Baghdad in recent weeks.

The United States would like to maintain that the violence is being initiated by al-Qaida, but who knows? The essential question will be, how much violence can the United States tolerate in Iraq without feeling obliged to respond to it with U.S. troops, particularly as the elections approach and the risk rises of bloodshed disrupting the elections?

For me, the first answer would have been to start the U.S. troop withdrawal on Jan. 16, the original election date, having told the Iraqis in advance our intention so they could not have delayed our departure by fooling around with the electoral law.

The second answer, which I believe must prevail now, is that the United States begin the withdrawal from 120,000 to 50,000 on March 8, no matter what the Iraqis do. This needs to be an American decision, and the American people have had far more than enough of this stupid war, whether it be Mr. Bush's or Mr. Obama's.

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