This week on Uncommon Knowledge, Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. We begin with a recent comment by the Vice President. “I’m very optimistic about Iraq,” Joe Biden said not long ago. “I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” This administration?

Luckily, there are no paternity tests to Biden’s claim that this is a victory for the Obama administration…I think the truth is there’s a Mexican standoff between Iraq and the autocracies of the region. The autocracies of the region try to destroy this nascent Iraqi democracy. They send jihadists; they have their media and the entire intellectual class in the Arab world against Iraq. But Iraq has succeeded.

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