That's the headline from a New York Daily News article by Richard Sisk that begins: "The U.S. is betting its last-ditch effort in Iraq on an Iraqi prime minister who thwarted the last two drives on Baghdad, dissed President Bush and blocked the rescue attempt of a kidnapped G.I."

Sisk also quotes Secretary of State Condi Rice addressing the issue of Maliki's trustworthiness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday:

"I understand the skepticism that people have that they will follow through" on the commitment to team up with U.S. troops to go after the militias and death squads, Rice said.

"I think the fact that they didn't act properly in the past does not mean that they won't act properly in the future," she added.

But John Burns and Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times conclude their dispatch from Baghdad with this:

A Shiite political leader who has worked closely with the Americans in the past said the Bush benchmarks appeared to have been drawn up in the expectation that Mr. Maliki would not meet them. "He cannot deliver the disarming of the militias," the politician said, asking that he not be named because he did not want to be seen as publicly criticizing the prime minister. "He cannot deliver a good program for the economy and reconstruction. He cannot deliver on services. This is a matter of fact. There is a common understanding on the American side and the Iraqi side."

Views such as these -- increasingly common among the political class in Baghdad -- are often accompanied by predictions that Mr. Maliki will be forced out as the crisis over the militias builds. The Shiite politician who described him as incapable of disarming militias suggested he might resign; others have pointed to an American effort in recent weeks to line up a "moderate front" of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish political leaders outside the government, and said that the front might be a vehicle for mounting a parliamentary coup against Mr. Maliki, with behind-the-scenes American support.

This is speculation, of course, though to the extent there is any truth to the claim it is deeply discomforting: we've drawn up plans knowing Maliki can't or won't meet his obligations, either to try and oust him from office or to set conditions for a withdrawal in a few months.

I hope that's not the case and that Maliki will indeed hold up his end of the bargain. Still, it demonstrates what a mess Iraq has become that our last ditch effort hinges almost completely on trusting this man.