"Prime Minister Maliki’s comments in Baghdad came in response to a reporter’s question about whether the Iraqi government had plans to evacuate Iraqis from Lebanon. After lashing out at Israel, Mr. Maliki said he had asked the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut to help evacuate Iraqis stranded by the Israeli campaign. His stance is noteworthy because it is a significant split with American policy toward Israel. It has been the Americans’ hope that Iraq would become President Bush’s staunchest ally among Arab nations. The Americans arranged a series of elections that ended up putting Shiite parties in power, and the White House helped boost Mr. Maliki by pushing last spring for the ouster of the prime minister at the time, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Maliki relies on the presence of 134,000 American troops in Iraq to stave off the insurgency led by Sunni Arabs, who ruled over the majority Shiite Arabs for decades. The resentment of the Iraqi government toward Israel calls into question one of the rationales among some conservatives for the American invasion of Iraq — that an American-backed democratic state here would inevitably become an ally of Israel and, by doing so, catalyze a change of attitude across the rest of the Arab world. A growing number of Iraqi officials have stepped forward in recent days to condemn Israel. On Sunday, in a rare show of unity, the 275-member Parliament issued a statement calling the Israeli strikes an act of “criminal aggression.” The militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose followers play a crucial role in the government, said last Friday that Iraqis would not “sit by with folded hands” while the violence in Lebanon raged. Mr. Sadr commands a powerful militia, the Mahdi Army."