Lost amid the Iranian recriminations over the assassination of Qassem Soleimani has been the outrage in Iraq. Soleimani was popular there, too, and Iraqi militia figures, including the powerful Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, were killed during our attack. Thousands have poured into Baghdad to mourn Soleimani’s death, and now the Iraqi parliament has taken a remarkable step. From the New York Times:

Lawmakers in Iraq voted on Sunday to require the government to end the presence of American troops in the country after the United States ordered the killing of the Iranian leader of the elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, on Iraqi soil. …

Although the vote was 170-0 in Parliament, many of its 328 members, primarily Kurds and Sunnis, did not attend the session and did not vote, showing the division in Parliament on the demands to oust American troops. While groups that grew out of Shiite militia organizations have pushed hard for the expulsion, Sunni Muslim factions and the Kurds wanted the United States to stay.

For that reason and others, the vote isn’t quite the hammer blow it’s being made out to be on CNN. The initiative, for example, doesn’t appear to be binding. And even if it was, there’s still a gaping gulf between enactment and enforcement. Iraq might want America out but it also doesn’t want a war, which is why the legislation’s language is very delicate. Rather than demanding an immediate withdrawal, it punts on a timetable and leaves enough of a window that some American forces might be allowed to stay. The most likely scenario is that the militias will step up their attacks while the government takes a more diplomatic route.

Still. Bear in mind that the reason the Bush (not Obama) administration negotiated the Status of Forces Agreement that initially withdrew us from Iraq was because the Iraqi parliament was unlikely to authorize legal protections for those troops. That same legislature is now rolling the ball in the same direction. By killing Soleimani, we’ve clocked Iraq in the head, too. And by giving them a common martyr, we’ve brought Iraqi Shiites closer to the Iranians, between whom there had been growing tensions. Even Moqtada al-Sadr, the populist cleric and Iraq’s most audible anti-Iran voice, is mourning Soleimani and calling on his followers “to be ready to protect Iraq.”

The bottom line, incredible in its irony, is this: the same democracy we once helped create has now ordered us out. The neocons care little about this, of course. They’ve rebranded themselves as clear-eyed realists, with Robert Kagan’s The Jungle Grows Back as their new seminal text. Rather than a land ripe for democratization, they now portray the Middle East as a hotbed of anarchy, which, they sigh, only America can keep at bay. Yet while their calculus has changed, their answer remains always the same: American troops abroad, forever and ever, amen.

That their past approach is now running up against their present one shouldn’t escape us. It was our so-called democratization of Iraq that empowered Iran in the first place, leading to our present crisis. American empire has appeared lately as an idiot colossus, blind and staggering around, swinging a tree trunk at blurry enemies indiscriminately. Without us, the hawks say, the Middle East will be roiled by disruption. What they miss is that we long ago became the region’s biggest disruptor.