Washington ? What if Bush promises to wear sackcloth and ashes to John Kerry’s Inaugural Ball, prostrates himself for 40 days and nights before Jordan’s king and Egypt’s president-for-life, and stages a real or a mock execution (to be determined by an online poll managed by al-Jazeera TV) of Rumsfeld the Ogre? Would that do it for you?

That scenario would no doubt provide satisfaction for those at home who see the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as one more episode in a quest for the humiliation and ouster of George W. Bush and for those abroad opposed to any exercise of U.S. power in their precincts. But it also risks throwing the American baby out with the Bush bathwater.

To leap to the conclusion that Arab dictators have suddenly gained moral superiority over the United States, which is no longer fit to pursue or speak about democratic change in the Middle East, would be even worse. The Abu Ghraib case demands justice for the guilty and the victims, not the donning of a national hair shirt and an American retreat from world leadership.

Regime change in Washington is a legitimate political goal that the American republic can survive. Bush’s domestic agenda is a sorry mishmash of backward-looking causes. His economic policies are short-termism at its most egregious, and the occupation of Iraq has shown a managerial incompetence that is breathtaking. There are plenty of reasons for change if you think the other guy can do better.

But there is no reason to make the same mistake those grinning, lascivious goons posing as guards made at Abu Ghraib — which is to assume that the humiliation of a foe is synonymous with justice. Those who were silent about torture in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s time should be modest about cloaking pre-existing political agendas in the name of that cause now.

Abu Ghraib does not change the essential reality about Iraq, which I have flogged here for months: It is up to Iraqis to determine their political future, and it is up to the Americans and other Arabs to get out of their way — yesterday.

That has not been the Bush way: Instead, proconsular absolutism has turned to yielding political power not to Iraqis but to the United Nations. This apparently is to deprive Kerry of a campaign issue and to placate Sunni Arab governments — governments that were silent about torture when committed by Saddam’s Sunni minority and that today prefer to see Iraq in chaos rather than ruled by Shiite Arabs.

“It is impossible for Iraq to be ruled by the Shiites,” a political adviser to a ruling Arab monarch said recently in a not-for-attribution setting that encouraged unusual candor. “Sunnis make up 85 percent of the population of the Arab world. How could it be democratic” for a national Shiite majority to rule an Arab country?

That is the key issue for King Abdullah of Jordan, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and other Sunni autocrats. Those damning photos and videos of abuses at Abu Ghraib, and others that may show similar incidents elsewhere in the overextended U.S.-British archipelago of war prisons, are useful clubs for them to wield against the Bush administration’s most ambitious visions of democracy and gender equality in the region.

None of this excuses the criminal actions of the guards. But it does argue for greater clarity about American capabilities and goals, both by Bush and by his critics at home and abroad. Keep what is at stake clearly in view.

The United States should remain committed to working for democracy in Iraq and to accepting the mathematical advantage that free elections give the Shiite majority. No U.N. formula for a caretaker Cabinet of “technocrats” rigged to Sunni interests can be allowed to finesse that. The alternative is a de facto partition of Iraq into armed ethnic camps.

U.S. military commanders are already cutting deals with local forces, whether Baathists in Fallujah or anti-Baathist militias in the south and in Kurdistan. The generals can feel the political wind shifting behind them in Washington. They will not waste lives in frontal assaults for political goals as uncertain and unclear as Bush’s have become in Iraq, or if they think Kerry will declare defeat and go home when elected.

The U.S. commitment to Iraq is endangered less by the crimes of the lowly in rank than by the distraction and political egotism of the mighty. Giving democracy in Iraq a chance to survive the U.S. presidential campaign is now a leadership challenge, for both Bush and Kerry.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.