As Nuri al-Maliki today sought help from Syria's president, Bashar Assad, to quell violence in Iraq, the embattled Iraqi prime minister faces mounting criticism from the US.
The latest attacks from Washington came from the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate armed services committee, Carl Levin. Returning from a three-day trip to Iraq and Jordan with the senior Republican John Warner, Mr Levin was brutally frank about Mr Maliki.
"I hope the parliament will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and more unifying prime minister and government," Mr Levin is quoted as saying in the Washington Post.
Mr Maliki, a Shia Muslim, has had a bad summer, with a steady stream of ministers quitting his government. Seventeen, almost half of his cabinet, have now left or suspended their participation in it.
The prime minister has been trying to hold a summit with rival Sunni political leaders and Kurdish officials to reach a compromise on several divisive issues, including a formula to distribute the country's oil revenue and a law aimed at allowing some former members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party back into government. But such a meeting, originally scheduled to start last week, has been repeatedly delayed.
A statement from Mr Levin and Mr Warner warned that recent meetings among Iraqi political leaders "could be the last chance for this government to solve the Iraqi political crisis". Should that effort fail, Mr Levin said, Iraq's parliament should throw out Mr Maliki and replace it with a better team.
According to the constitution, either the president or one-fifth of the 275-member parliament can make a no-confidence motion. Then an absolute majority vote would mean the administration had been voted out.
Even Bush administration officials are troubled by Mr Maliki's lack of progress in political reconciliation. The US ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, last week acknowledged that the Iraqi public's frustration with the government was "pretty striking".
US frustration with Mr Maliki has been long-standing. Last November, a memo written by the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, asked whether Mr Maliki, who was an activist in the underground Dawa movement under Saddam's regime, was up to the job of fostering national reconciliation. He was "either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action", Mr Hadley wrote.
The US president, George Bush, has defended Mr Maliki, saying that Iraq's leaders are learning how to lead after years of brutal dictatorship under Saddam. Despite their frustration with Mr Maliki, administration officials seem to hold the view that it is better to stick with the devil they know. Another leader would also face the same problems and take months to cobble together a new government.
Moreover, the two names most frequently mentioned as possible alternatives to Mr Maliki have their drawbacks. Adel Abdul-Mehdi, the Shia vice-president, is considered by the Americans as being too close to Iran, while Ayad Allawi hardly distinguished himself when he served as the country's first prime minister in the post-Saddam era. Since then he has spent most of his time in Jordan rather than in Iraq.
Mr Maliki also has one other thing going for him. With Washington waiting for the September 15 report from General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and Mr Crocker, on the success or otherwise of the "surge" strategy, even Democrats will be reluctant to push for a change in Iraq's leadership at such a critical time.