One gaping analytical flaw in the ISG report is that it argues that Iran and Syria don’t want Iraq to fall apart and posits a common interest with the U.S. on that basis. But there a lot of outcomes short of Iraq falling apart, and no reason to believe that U.S. and its enemies prefer the same outcome among all the different possibilities. Iran and Syria want first of all to defeat us in Iraq and then to create an Iraq that is part of their geo-political bloc in the Middle East rather than ours. There is no papering over those differences, although the report, weakly, attempts to do it.