A quasi-Debaathification Commission has excluded over 500 candidates from March’s parliamentary elections in Iraq. The overwhelming majority of them, of course, are Sunnis. The men responsible for the exclusion are running for office themselves. The prime minister has formally approved of the exclusions. So much for the cross-sectarian coalitions that looked like they loomed on the horizon after last year’s provincial elections, and so much for the hopeful presumption that Iraq’s problems were becoming more mundanely political. The prospect of violence is… unclear. I’ve heard a lot of “we’re not going back to sectarian war” talk for the past two years, and hope it’s true.

What’s clearer is that the Obama administration has a real role to play in walking Iraq back from this impasse. Look at this quote from Mithal al-Alusi, a genuine Iraqi liberal:

“We need to hear from you Americans. Please don’t just watch this from the outside,” said Mithal al-Alusi, a former member of the now-disbanded commission on de-Baathification. “The White House needs to move and move quickly.”

(Alusi, by the way, fought the old commission’s abuses, but I digress.) This is a test for whether the administration means what it says about not back-burner-ing Iraq. I have no idea whether the U.S. possesses the leverage to overturn the candidate exclusions. But it most certainly possesses the leverage to speak out against the overbroad and reportedly incoherent manner in which the commission decides upon the bans, and unquestionably possesses the leverage to warn against the consequences of letting the Sunnis experience another five years of disenfranchisement — this one imposed explicitly by the ruling Shiite politicians. Officials from the Maliki government have been coming to Washington for months to talk about how they want to expand commerce with the U.S. and entrench diplomatic ties. Sure would be a shame if the infidelity to the law exhibited by that commission got in the way of such laudable goals, now wouldn’t it?

Is this interference in Iraqi politics? Well, yeah. Let’s not sugarcoat it or be euphemistic. But the U.S. still has a diplomatic role as a mediator of persistent disputes. It’s not the sort of thing you want to normalize. But years of miscalculations in Iraq should have taught us that it’s untenable to possess still-visible power in the country and fail to act when a need for arbitration emerges. That arbitration can take many different forms. Maybe it’s a good idea to enlist the U.N. mission for this. But we can either act now or risk deeper unraveling after the election.

Also: have you put The Majlis in your RSS yet? Because you really should. It reminds me of what I tried to do in 2004 with Iraq’d, except done much better.

Update: Well, this blows. Good for Biden.