Our guest author is Ali Gharib, a national security reporter at the Center for American Progress.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that, amid a debate on impeaching the Iranian finance minister in Iran’s majles, or parliament, Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad admitted that sanctions were having an impact on the ability of Iranians to do financial transactions abroad. Defending his cabinet’s handling of a $2.6 billion banking embezzlement scandal, Ahmadinejad mentioned the constraints on Iranian business. The Post’s Thomas Erdbrink reported:

“Our banks cannot make international transactions anymore,” the embattled president said in a speech before parliament to defend his minister of economic affairs and finance against impeachment charges related to the scandal.

The frank admission from Ahmadinejad is likely to be heard any number of ways in Washington, depending on who’s doing the listening. For Iran hawks, who have insisted that sanctions aren’t working (and yet call for more), the news from Ahmadinejad might be a thorn in their side. For those who say some sanctions are misguided and more engagement is necessary to resolve the crisis between Iran and the West, this news could also be viewed as a set-back.

But neither view is entirely right. The issue at hand is the common conflation of larger, broad economic sanctions and those targeted at particular Iranian behavior or activity. Ahmadinejad’s statements yesterday weren’t about either nuclear sanctions or human rights sanctions (which have been effective and remain the morally right thing to do, respectively). Instead, the embattled president was referring to the economic sanctions which have cut off Iran’s financial institutions from the rest of the world. But the intended effect of this particular sort of isolation is not quite what its proponents probably intended. Indeed, if the current full-court press for more sanctions is any indication, Iran’s economic isolation backfired today.

Economic sanctions are, as now-Secretary of Defense and then-CIA director Leon Panetta said in 2010, supposed to "help weaken the regime." But that’s not what happened Thursday in Tehran. Ahmadinejad instead appealed to the duress placed on Iran by Western sanctions precisely to avoid the prospect of his cabinet falling apart because of the embezzlement scandal (which was unrelated to sanctions and seems not to have even touched the regime itself, meaning the office of the Supreme Leader). According to the Wall Street Journal, Ahmadinejad told the majles: "Iran is facing unprecedented pressures from international sanctions and the finance minister has a pivotal role in managing this situation."

From there, Erdbrink reported in the Post that it was this pressure on Iran that led powerful Ahmadinejad rival and majles speaker Ali Larijani to defend the government and bless the continued service of the finance minister:

The minister, Shamseddin Hosseini, was spared impeachment when a leading Ahmadinejad opponent, parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, came to the government’s defense and urged the lawmakers to keep Hosseini in the cabinet — with a warning — on grounds that Iran already faces too many problems. The parliament then voted 141 to 93 against impeaching Hosseini…. Larijani, the influential speaker of parliament and former nuclear negotiator, pleaded with the lawmakers to forgo impeaching Hosseini, arguing that the embezzlement case affected the entire political system and that a more thorough investigation was needed. He also pointed to the increasing pressure on Iran. “We are not in a condition to increase the cost of running the country,” Larijani told parliament. “You have showed a yellow card to the minister, and that is enough for now.”

Still, Washington’s hawks will almost certainly press on. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) has said he intends to push sanctions on Iran’s central bank mindful of the fact that it could hurt ordinary Iranians — or, as he put it, "take the food out of the mouths" of ordinary Iranians. It apparently doesn’t much matter that these broad economic sanctions, in this case, also helped the government paper over its problems, at least for the time being.

Ringing the alarm over a "dawning Muslim Brotherhood crescent" in North Africa, Lee Smith offers up a classic bit of self-contradiction:

Some argue that in spite of its anti-Israel and anti-Western rhetoric, Erdogan’s Freedom and Justice Party really is a model moderate Islamist organization. After all, there’s no ban on alcohol in Istanbul bars, and Turkish women aren’t compelled to wear the headscarf. Unfortunately, these domestic issues have virtually no bearing on vital U.S. interests. What should matter to U.S. policymakers is that Erdogan is the architect of an adventurist foreign policy and has promised to send warships to protect future aid flotillas. Erdogan, who uses anti-Israel rhetoric to stir the passions of the Arab masses, is no moderate, but a demagogue who has patterned his career after the modern Middle East’s most famous radical, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

So Erdogan’s a dangerous Islamist… because he’s a demagogic nationalist just like Nasser. The same Nasser who outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned, tortured, and executed hundreds of its members. Got it.

For a less hyperventilatory take on Islamists’ increasing political participation in the region, read Hussein Ibish and David Rohde.

The Washington Post’s Style section has a piece on Iranian author Roya Hakakian, who has written a new book examining the 1992 murder of Iranian Kurdish dissidents by the Iranian Quds Force in Berlin:

The killings occurred as Germany was improving political and financial ties with Iran, and German diplomats initially tried to blame the deaths on a Turkish faction. But the investigation, led by a determined Berlin prosecutor, eventually implicated Tehran’s Quds Force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that had a list of 500 political assassination targets abroad.

In light of the 1997 verdict in the case, European Union governments suspended relations with Iran for nearly half a year, and Interpol put Iran’s then-minister of intelligence on its most-wanted list. Afterward, Tehran halted political hits in Western countries (though they continued elsewhere). But last month, the U.S. Justice Department accused an Iranian American used-car salesman of trying — on behalf of the Quds Force — to pay a Mexican gangster to kill the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant.

Hakakian makes a good point comparing the German response to the attacks and the recent alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, DC:

“Nobody had to bomb Tehran in 1997, but the regime did suffer at the time the greatest blow that it had ever suffered at the hands of the international community,” she said. “Far more was achieved than anything that we have managed to do in all the years of these belligerent nonconfrontational confrontations. All it took was a serious prosecutor, a really good judge and a bunch of persistent people… The whole E.U. stood together to speak with one voice, and Iran really did stop for a long time.”

Exactly. Beating the diplomacy drums may not be as satisfying to some as beating the other kind, but it remains the most effective way to protect the U.S. and strengthen international resolve toward changing Iran’s behavior.

Responding to conservative alarm over an Islamist takeover in the wake of the Ennahda party’s success in Tunisia’s elections Sunday (today’s example brought to you by the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens), Hussein Ibish cautions that "Islamists are not ‘taking over’ anywhere yet."

Far too many observers are leaping to this conclusion because inevitably Islamist parties, which in most Arab states have been the only well-organized opposition groups during dictatorships, were poised to take early advantage of newly-opened political space.

In states that have seen revolution, most notably Libya, and those undergoing managed transitions, such as Tunisia and Egypt, it’s no surprise that the biggest single challenge is negotiating the relationship of Islamist groups with the emerging new systems and other forces in those societies.

The strong performance of Islamists in the preliminary Tunisian elections, the advantageous position they seemingly hold in the run-up to the Egyptian elections, and their clear influence in the new Libyan leadership does not mean the Arab world is entering a phase of Islamist rule.

It does, however, reflect the fact that at the moment Islamists have significant constituencies that will be reflected in more pluralistic systems, and that they are well-organized, while secularists are not.

David Rohde similarly writes that "The election results in Tunisia should not be feared."

I have argued — and will continue to argue — that the danger is not Islam. It is authoritarianism. Secular regimes, such as Syria’s, have proven just as repressive as authoritarian Islamist regimes, like Iran. Islam is not inherently backward nor incompatible with modernity. Salafism is.

Constitutions that mandate elections, individual rights and protections for women and minorities are the best defense against authoritarianism in any form. Democratic principles and institutions, not individual leaders, thwart the concentration of power. The West must now trust the democratic process it has long said it supports.

This is something that I’ve also argued since the uprisings started back in January. Islamism is a political fact in the region, something the Obama administration has shown that it recognizes. But there’s little evidence that Islamists’ political program enjoys widespread support, they’re simply the best-organized vessel of popular outrage over decades of corruption and (Western-backed) authoritarianism. Rather than attempting to curb Islamists’ participation in elections, the focus should be on offering assistance in the development of pluralistic systems that can accommodate religiously oriented political actors while securing all peoples’ basic rights. If we’re serious about democracy, there’s no other option.

This morning, UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) approved the Palestinians’ bid for membership by a vote of 107 to 14, with 52 abstentions.

Legislation dating back more than 15 years stipulates a complete cutoff of American financing to any United Nations agency that accepts the Palestinians as a full member. Unesco — the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — depends on the United States for 22 percent of its budget, about $70 million a year.

The Obama administration and Unesco had tried to avert the approval and diplomats had desperately negotiated with Congress, the Palestinians and other Unesco member states to find a resolution that would preserve the agency’s budget.

Americans for Peace Now’s Lara Friedman has a good piece detailing the U.S. legislation (pdf) that mandates the cutoff of U.S. funds to "the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states." As Friedman notes, "the chances of the 112th Congress amending 22 USC 287e to avoid a crisis at the UN are low to non-existent, despite the fact that cutting off funding to UNESCO and other UN agencies would clearly be detrimental to U.S. interests."

Politico’s Jonathan Allen also reports that the Palestinians’ successful UNESCO bid has "spurred a behind-the-scenes Beltway tussle over whether punishing UNESCO for granting rights to the Palestinians is worth the cost to other American interests, particularly those of major tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft."

The potential consequences to American businesses are important enough that the State Department has invited representatives of about two dozen technology and pharmaceutical companies and associations to participate in a discussion of the matter in Foggy Bottom Monday afternoon.

“Even as we approach this situation diplomatically, the Department of State and our U.S. Government partners would like to invite you to a discussion on the current state of play at UNESCO, as well as the ramifications of the Palestinian bid for membership,” reads a copy of the invitation obtained by POLITICO. Invitees include Apple, Google, Microsoft, the Motion Picture Association of America, PhRMA and the Recording Industry Association of America.

While they may have an interest in keeping UNESCO funded, it seems unlikely that major American businesses would pick a fight with Israel, which got a pre-vote boost from friendly lawmakers who want to make sure that funds are, indeed, cut off.

It’s worth remembering that the U.S. rejoined UNESCO in 2002, after an 18 year absence, as part of President George W. Bush’s effort to garner international support for the Iraq invasion. Bush made the surprise announcement that the U.S. would rejoin the organization at the top of a speech to the UN General Assembly that otherwise served as a bill of particulars against Saddam Hussein. It would be sadly ironic if U.S. domestic political realities now compelled our withdrawal from UNESCO at the same time as Iraqi domestic political realities have compelled our withdrawal from Iraq.

UPDATE: Senator Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation, writing at UN Dispatch:

To Americans, UNESCO is best known for designating World Heritage Sites. It also leads global efforts to bring clean water to the poor, promotes educational and curriculum building in the developing world, and manages a tsunami early warning system in the Pacific, among other important tasks. This critical work would be jeopardized if UNESCO’s top funder stops paying its bills.

The immediate damage would not be limited to UNESCO. The moment Palestine is admitted to UNESCO it will also clear the path for its entry to the World Intellectual Property Organization. This is a lesser known UN agency that serves American businesses and brands by setting global standards for copyrights and adjudicating cross border patent disputes. In the last year alone, dozens of major American companies brought cases before WIPO — the American Automobile Association, Apple, The North Face, Costco and Facebook to name just a few. If Palestine joins WIPO, the United States will have to pull out, limiting its ability to steer policies in ways that advance American economic interests and create jobs here at home.

The damage would not stop there. The membership of UN agencies like the International Civil Aviation Organization, International Postal Union, and the International Telecommunications Union are also likely to admit Palestine. Each of these agencies performs tasks that American lawmakers probably take for granted. [...]

As long as these laws remain on the books, Congress is setting the stage for America’s waning influence over international affairs. From businesses interests to non-governmental organizations who care about America’s influence at the UN, everyone must take a stand and urge Congress to give the President the flexible authority needed protect our national security and economic interests.

Responding to President Obama’s announcement of full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, Fred and Kim Kagan, two of the leading analysts behind the 2007-8 U.S. troop surge, write, "Iran has just defeated the United States in Iraq."

The American withdrawal, which comes after the administration’s failure to secure a new agreement that would have allowed troops to remain in Iraq, won’t be good for ordinary Iraqis or for the region. But it will unquestionably benefit Iran.

President Obama’s February 2009 speech at Camp Lejeune accurately defined the U.S. goal for Iraq as "an Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant." He then outlined how the U.S. would achieve that goal by working "to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe haven to terrorists."

Despite recent administration claims to the contrary, Iraq today meets none of those conditions. Its sovereignty is hollow because of the continued activities of Iranian-backed militias in its territory. Its stability is fragile, since the fundamental disputes among ethnic and sectarian groups remain unresolved. And it is not in any way self-reliant. The Iraqi military cannot protect its borders, its airspace or its territorial waters without foreign assistance.

What the Kagans seem to be describing here is a scenario in which the surge didn’t really achieve its goals. And this is, in fact, the case. As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Peter Juul noted in a September 2008 Center for American Progress report, while the surge did facilitate a dramatic reduction in violence, this was "purchased through a number of choices that have worked against achieving meaningful political reconciliation. The reductions in violence in 2007 and 2008 have, in fact, made true political accommodation in Iraq more elusive, contrary to the central theory of the surge."

But the Kagans can’t possibly recognize this, as that would be undermining their signal achievement, so they have to spin a tale in which everything was going basically fine until President Obama came along and ruined it by irresponsibly adhering to a withdrawal agreement that President Bush signed (which Fred Kagan hailed as a "great accomplishment" at the time).

As for the idea that the U.S. withdrawal will "unquestionably benefit Iran," newsflash: The Iraq war unquestionably benefited Iran. As an Iraqi friend put it to me at a conference in 2008, “America has baked Iraq like a cake, and given it to Iran to eat.”

As the New York Times reported earlier this month, Iran’s influence in Iraq — which was always primarily political, not military — has actually declined over the past two years (as with Al Qaeda in Iraq, the U.S. has benefited from our adversaries’ ability to alienate their own allies), but it’s worth noting that Iran’s influence was at its height when there were over 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Does anyone seriously imagine that a few thousand extra U.S. troops would make the difference here?

It must be pointed out how deeply humorous it is to see the Kagans belatedly sounding the alarm like this over Iran’s influence in Iraq. In the past, they’ve tended to downplay or selectively represent that influence in a way that buttressed their preferred narrative of the war’s progress, something Brian Katulis and I pointed out back in April 2008:

One of the most skewed analyses of the recent intra-Shiite clashes in Iraq came from two architects of the Bush administration’s 2007 surge, Fred and Kimberly Kagan. Writing in the Weekly Standard, the Kagans described last month’s battle in Basra as a security operation launched by "the legitimate Government of Iraq and its legally constituted security forces [against] illegal, foreign-backed, insurgent and criminal militias serving leaders who openly call for the defeat and humiliation of the United States and its allies in Iraq and throughout the region."

These depictions ignore an inconvenient truth: The leaders in Iraq’s current government are closely aligned with Tehran and represent some of Iran’s closest allies in Iraq. This is perhaps best illustrated by the warm welcome Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received in his visit to Iraq last month, which punctures the myth that the current battle is between a unified Iraqi government and fringe groups receiving support from Iran. [...]

Over the past five years, Iran has hedged its bets, maintaining ties and offering support to all of the major Shiite factions in Iraq, including Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army, which fought pitched battles with the Iraqi army and the Badr Corps last month. But Americans should be clear about where Iran’s closest allies are in Iraq. They are at the highest levels of the Iraqi government.

Having now recognized this, the Kagans answer is the same as always: The U.S. must stay and stay in Iraq. If not, the U.S. will have failed. But, as Conor Friedersford aptly put it, "If the war you advocate requires for its success the indefinite deployment of U.S. troops, you’ve advocated a failed war."

As my colleagues and I noted in our May 2010 memo, The Iraq War Ledger, in terms of its strategic, economic, and human costs, the intervention in Iraq has been a disaster for the United States. We’ll be grappling with its consequences, of which Iranian empowerment is only one, for decades. It’s transparently dishonest for the war’s boosters to attempt to lay blame for this at the door of the Obama administration.

Here’s an ominous exchange in today’s Washington Post interview with Jordanian King Abdullah:

Q: [The Arab Spring] is a disaster for Israel, isn’t it?

You have seen what has happened in Egypt [and] Turkey. We are actually the last man standing with our relationship with Israel.

Q: The Israelis are worried the Egyptians will break the [peace] treaty.

That is a very, very strong possibility.

But in Foreign Policy, former Washington Post Jerusalem bureau chief Janine Zacharia writes, "Egypt’s role in brokering the exchange of Shalit for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners demonstrated that fears of a major break between Egypt and Israel have been wildly overstated."

While the Israeli government, Hamas, and other regional actors did their part, there is no question that Egypt played the pivotal role in finally resolving the Shalit affair. Cairo mediated the deal, arranged for Shalit’s safe return to Israel, and organized the flights for the 40 Palestinian prisoners who were sent into exile in Turkey, Qatar, and Syria. Egyptian diplomats are understandably proud of their accomplishment. Egypt, which considers itself the most important Arab state, demonstrated for the first time in many years that it could achieve a difficult diplomatic objective. Despite the anti-Israel rhetoric of Egyptian politicians playing to the Cairo crowds as they prepare for parliamentary elections slated to take place next month, Shalit’s release showed that Israeli-Egyptian ties are surviving, even thriving, in the post-Mubarak era. [...]

It wasn’t out of love for Israel that Egypt mediated Shalit’s release. Egypt’s military sees a vital self interest in keeping the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty robust. Egypt has its own security interests. Its primary concerns are preserving stability in Gaza, with which it shares a border, and maintaining order in the Sinai, where it has sought to stop smuggling. Another objective of Egypt’s interim military leadership is to ease pressure at home, where demonstrators have sharply criticized the current government for undercutting democracy. "The agreement and the deal are a medal on Egypt’s chest to be added to the several medals that it deservedly earned for its ongoing defense and support of the Palestinian cause," one commentator wrote in Al-Akhbar, Egypt’s mass-circulation, pro-government daily.

Even more important is Egypt’s desire to reassure the United States that it remains a reliable regional partner. Just three weeks before Shalit’s release, Egypt’s foreign minister, Mohamed Amr, told the Associated Press, that Egypt was seeking ways to strengthen its "strategic relationship" with the United States, and pledged that Egypt remained committed to the peace treaty with Israel, despite the comments by the Prime Minister and the Arab League Secretary General to the contrary. The U.S. Congress has been making highly public noises about conditioning or reducing military aid to Egypt, a threat that the Egyptian military and its lobbyists take very seriously. President Barack Obama called Egypt’s de facto leader, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, on Monday to push the military to end emergency law and military trials, and to advance the date for presidential elections. The Egyptian military believes that demonstrating its solid ties with Israel is key to blunting such U.S. pressure.

Read the whole thing.

Responding to (unconfirmed) news reports of a new Obama administration proposal to restart talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, one which would allow the Israelis to continue building in existing settlements while halting the construction of new ones, former Bush administration Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams writes, "If this is a good idea, a decent compromise, one can only wonder why it took the Obama White House nearly three years to get there. For this policy was precisely what the Bush Administration agreed with prime ministers Sharon and Olmert."

This echoes what Abrams first wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June 2009, reflecting the Israeli understanding of what the agreements entailed, and scolding the Obama administration for "abandon[ing] the understandings about settlements reached by the previous administration with the Israeli government."

But according to Amb. Dan Kurtzer, who was U.S. Ambassador to Israel at the time in question, and who responded to these claims in a June 2009 Washington Post op-ed, "The problem is that there was no such understanding."

The first event the Israelis cite is the 2003 discussions on a four-part draft that included the notion that construction within settlements might be permitted if confined to the already built-up areas of the settlements. The idea was to draw a line around the outer perimeter of built-up areas in settlements and to allow building only inside that line. This draft was never codified, and no effort was made then to define the line around the built-up areas of settlements. Nonetheless, Israel began to act largely in accordance with its own reading of these provisions, probably believing that U.S. silence conferred assent.

Second, President Bush’s 2004 letter conveyed U.S. support of an agreed outcome of negotiations in which Israel would retain "existing major Israeli population centers" in the West Bank "on the basis of mutually agreed changes . . . ." One of the key provisions of this letter was that U.S. support for Israel’s retaining some settlements was predicated on there being an "agreed outcome" of negotiations. Despite Israel’s contention that this letter allowed it to continue building in the large settlement blocs of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, the letter did not convey any U.S. support for or understanding of Israeli settlement activities in these or other areas in the run-up to a peace agreement.

In his 2004 letter to [Condoleezza] Rice, [Ariel Sharon adviser Dov] Weissglas addressed the issue of the "construction line," saying that "within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria." However, there never were any "agreed principles of settlement activities." Moreover, the effort to define the "construction line" was never consummated: Israel and the United States discussed briefly but did not reach agreement on the definition of the construction line of settlements. Weissglas’s letter also promised "continuous action" to remove all the unauthorized outposts, but Israel removed almost none of them.

As for Abrams’ suggestion that Israel would actually be willing to confine itself to only building within "existing" (but still illegal, of course) settlements, please note that the Netanyahu government is now set to move forward with the first new settlement of Giv’at Hamatos, "the first new settlement that Israel has established in East Jerusalem since the creation of the adjacent Har Homa in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister." Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli NGO that tracks developments in and around the city, calls Giv’at Hamatos is "a game changer that significantly changes the possible border between Israel and Palestine, and significantly makes an agreement on the border in Jerusalem more difficult."

I expect we’ll hear soon from Abrams that this, too, is not really a big deal.

Tunisians went to the polls yesterday:

Voting lines wrapped around street corners on Sunday and parents brought children to witness the milestone, the first truly free vote in Tunisia’s history and the first election of the Arab Spring, which began in this small North African nation and sent shock waves through the region.

There were few reports of fraud or violence, and election officials said turnout was higher than expected, with an estimated 7 million of 10.4 million people eligible to vote. Tunisian officials said they would probably release preliminary results Monday or Tuesday.

For Tunisians, it was an opportunity to have their say in the political rebirth of their country after the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January. But the vote was also closely watched in other Arab countries that are stepping toward democracy after decades of dictatorial rule. Egypt is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections in a month, the first since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, and, with the declaration of the formal end of the regime of Moammar Gaddafi, Libyans are expected to go to the polls in eight months.

“Whatever the outcome is, it is our decision, it is not imposed on us,” said Ismail Trabelsi, 42, an environmental engineer who went to vote in the middle-class neighborhood of al-Aouina at 7 a.m. He waited in line for more than an hour to cast his ballot in a school, one of more than 4,000 polling stations. “We’ve waited 55 years for this moment,” he said.

As I joked on Twitter earlier, it’s weird that the story, nor any of the others I’ve read on this weekend’s elections, doesn’t mention any Tunisians thanking George W. Bush for invading Iraq. Given the frequency with which neocons have been demanding credit for the Arab Awakening, you’d think we might have heard something…

But the serious point is that it makes an enormous difference that these elections are not happening under the auspices of a foreign military occupation. This is something the people of Tunisia have done for themselves, and they deserve to be immensely proud of that.

Responding angrily to the Obama administration’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of this year, the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan writes that President Obama "has decided to abandon America’s interest in Iraq and damage our position in the Middle East":

This retreat will have great costs for the United States. It squanders the gains made by both American and Iraqi military forces over the last four years, but, even more important, it squanders the enormous opportunity to forge an alliance with Iraq at a time when such an alliance would be of tremendous value to the United States. It dramatically increases the likelihood that the new and unstable Iraqi democratic experiment—already under attack from an authoritarian prime minister and a hostile Islamic Republic of Iran—will fail. The withdrawal of American forces now serving as peacekeepers along the Arab-Kurd seam greatly increases the likelihood of ethnic civil war. The withdrawal of American military protection from a state helpless to defend itself on its own effectively throws Iraq into the arms of Iran, however the Iraqis feel about the matter.

Interestingly, Kagan doesn’t mention that this "retreat" is being done in accordance with an agreement that the previous administration signed with the Iraqi government.

Even more interestingly, when that agreement was signed, Fred Kagan himself hailed it as a great U.S. success, telling radio host Hugh Hewitt:

The Iranians are desperate for Iraq not to align itself strategically with the United States, and they have been literally trying to bribe everybody they can bribe in Iraq, and running a fantastic information operations campaign in Iraq to make this an unpopular and hard thing to do. And the Iraqi government has done it anyway. And that is actually a great accomplishment for us, and it tells us a lot about where this Shia Iraqi government actually stands on whether it wants to be aligned with the United States, or whether it wants to be aligned with Iran.

So, just to be clear: Signing the agreement was a great success. Actually following it is a failure. Got it.