[VISION] | PEOPLE: There are no people visible in the image. | TEXT: and foreign policy "realists" who took the world as it is. They had styled themselves as unillusioned men who had thought that the Iraq war, and George W. Bush's entire diplomacy of freedom, were projects of folly-romantic, self deluding undertakings in the Arab world. To the extent that these men thought of the Greater Middle East, they entered it through the gateway of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The key to the American security dilemma in the region, they maintained, was an Arab-Israeli settlement that would drain the swamps of anti-Americanism and reconcile the Arab "moderates" to the Pax Americana. This was a central plank of the Iraq Study Group—the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian issue to the peace of the region, and to the American position in the lands of Islam. Nor had Robert Gates made much of a secret of his reading of Iran. He and Zbigniew Brzezinski had been advocates of "engaging" the regime in Tehran—this was part of the creed of the "realists." It was thus remarkable that, in his last policy speech, Gates acknowledged a potentially big payoff of the American labor in Iraq: a residual U.S. military presence in that country as a way of monitoring the Iranian regime next door. Is Gates right about both the progress in Iraq and the U.S. future in the country? In short, yes. The Iraqis needn't trumpet the obvious fact in broad daylight, but the balance of power in the Persian Gulf would be altered for the better by a security arrangement between the United States and the government in Baghdad. The Sadrist have already labeled a potential accord with the Americans as a deal with the devil, but the Sadrist have no veto over the big national decisions in Baghdad. If the past is any guide, Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki has fought and won a major battle with the Sadists; he crushed them on the battlefield but made room for them in his coalition government, giving them access to s