Evidently it’s not enough to topple another nation’s government by force and then leave it prey to marauding terrorists, kidnap gangs, religious zealots and Iranian provocateurs.

Now some congressional Democrats want to punish Iraq more by telling its leaders how they’re supposed to think and speak.

Here’s a news flash for the handful of Dems who shamefully boycotted Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki’s speech Wednesday to a joint meeting of Congress: Al-Maliki is not just a puppet who’s forgotten his pro-Israel playbook.

He is an Arab. All other Arab leaders in the world, and many U.S. allies, also are critical of Israeli tactics and pressing for an immediate Israeli cease-fire.

Is al-Maliki supposed to fry his own political future and usefulness in Iraq just to act the shill for America and be as non-Arab as possible?

Such politically motivated petulance is tantamount to holding up the white flag in Iraq by saying its leaders must betray their own people and beliefs to serve American constituencies. Surely the Democratic leadership has a better strategy than that for ending the war.

The fact remains that al-Maliki’s moderation is the best hope right now for ending the Iraq adventure with something other than civil war and Islamic revolution.

He defied Iraqi public opinion and ignored his political advisers by coming to America at all at a time when Israel is killing Arabs every day. In doing so, he put his life even more at risk than it already was from taking on the pro-Iranian hotheads inside his own government.

Al-Maliki did all of this not because he’s working against U.S. interests in the Middle East, but because he’s working for them.

Among the Democrats who boycotted al-Maliki’s speech were Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Reps. Nita Lowey, Carolyn Maloney and Gary Ackerman of New York.

An even larger number tried to get the speech canceled out of pique that al-Maliki referred to Israeli “aggression” and ducked a reporter’s question on Hezbollah.

Yet al-Maliki is one of the few Shiites in power in Iraq who didn’t spend their exile in Iran or later fall beneath the ayatollahs’ thumbs. He spent the years of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny in secular Damascus instead.

He had to be wooed, hard, to take a job in which he’s struggling against the odds to hold his nation together, attract Sunnis into governance, defeat the military challenge from religious hard-liners and terrorists, and expunge the most radical extremists from his own security forces.

He has been in office less than 100 days, and he’s already losing ground.

A recent U.N. human-rights report painted a sobering picture of a nation where civilians now die at the rate of 100 a day and where at least 164 nurses, 100 doctors, 13 judges and a number of moderate imams have been murdered since Saddam was toppled.

Ackerman, a senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee who was among those boycotting al-Maliki’s speech, accused the Iraqi prime minister of catering “to a very bad crowd.”

“If you mollycoddle terrorists, you give them license to continue,” Ackerman said in a statement Wednesday. The New Yorker seemed blind to the irony of saying such things about an Iraqi trying so hard to stem the tide of terrorism in his land.

As al-Maliki told Congress, “This is a battle between true Islam, for which a person’s liberty and rights constitute essential cornerstones, and terrorism, which wraps itself in a false Islamic cloak.”

If Ackerman had gone to the speech, he might now have a better appreciation for the stakes when one version of intolerant, militant Islam looking backward battles another that looks, with al-Maliki, forward to the ballot box and compromise and a more rational future.