Progress in Iraq has always been about teams of people and teams of teams - and ultimately about young men and women, Iraqi as well as people from the coalition.

Don't forget Yemen, where there are also extremist elements, as we saw recently.

Iraq has gone from being on the brink to being on the mend, and it clearly has some big advantages.

Over the last few years they have done a superb job in their fight against al-Qaida. As you may recall, our embassy in Jedda (in Saudi Arabia) was overrun some four years ago and a number of foreign workers went home because of violence against them.

Syria has allowed its soil to be transited by foreign fighters who have come from a variety of source countries in the Gulf area and in the - in North African countries.There are some signs that that may have been reduced somewhat in the last couple of months. We need to watch that a bit and see if that is the case.

There has, indeed, been very substantial progress in Iraq over the past year - violence is down by 80 percent, civilian deaths by about the same, and so on.

The fact is that Iran doesn't want to see the Taliban come back any more than do most Afghan citizens.