When drones launched from Iraqi soil struck Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline in September, they did more than disrupt four percent of the world's oil supply — they exposed the fragile fiction at the heart of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi's government: that the state controls its own territory. Three weeks before the US-led coalition's scheduled withdrawal, al-Zaidi finds himself caught between the expectations of Washington and Riyadh on one side, and pro-Iranian armed factions on the other, who have demonstrated repeatedly that they answer to no authority he can summon. It is an old dile