The enemies of a democratic, self-governing Iraq showed their murderous colors again Monday with the suicidal car-bomb assassination of Iraqi Governing Council President Izzadine Saleem. U.S. officials vowed that the devastating attack on the council's convoy outside coalition headquarters in Baghdad will not delay the peaceful handover of power to Iraqi leaders June 30 - and it should not.

The chief objective in Iraq should be to show insurgents and other terrorists that they cannot disrupt the steady march toward self-government.

The so-called insurgency of the past year is all about power and intimidation. Iraqi "insurgents" aren't nationalists. First they attacked U.S. troops; next, Iraqis who worked for the coalition, then Iraqi cops, then foreign contractors, then Iraqi leaders serving in the transition to self-government. Another governing council member, Akila al-Hashimi, was fatally ambushed in her car last September. The insurgents even attack Iraq's oil industry, the once and future source of national prosperity. The killers, whether outside al-Qaida terrorists or Iraqi militants following radical clerics such as Muqtada al-Sadr, serve their own narrow agendas - not Iraq's greater good.

U.S. officials should keep hardening the targets, stick to the timetable, then pray moderate Iraqis and Arabs realize just who are their real enemies. Retired Maj. Gen. Mohammed Abdul-Latif, a former Saddam Hussein-era general appointed by the Americans to lead Iraqi security forces in the rebellious Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, tried to reason with tribal elders and sheiks there Sunday. "We can make (Americans) use their rifles against us or we can make them build our country, it's your choice," Abdul-Latif told more than 40 sheiks, city council members and imams.

The general's appeal to reason may have a better chance to persuade than U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's the same day. In Jordan, Powell blasted Arab leaders seething over the Abu Ghraib prison abuse for not expressing similar outrage over the beheading of American Nick Berg by al-Qaida terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

"I would like to have seen a much higher level of outrage throughout the world, and especially the Arab world," Powell said. How long is it going to take for Mideast moderates to declare common cause against suicide bombers and their cynical bosses?

Assassinations such as Saleem's explode the myth that if the Americans just pull out of Iraq, life will be better. The enemies of self-government want power for no one but themselves and will even kill their neighbor to get it.

Anyone and anything is fair game for enemies of self-government. It will take brave moderates, as Saleem was, to step up and secure it.