Iraq and Afghanistan

With the possibility of an amicable development of relations among the major groups in Iraq it seems to me that thought should be given to developing a federal system. As readers will remember, I have always insisted that the Kurds should be allowed to have a state of their own. But without American support this seems unlikely.

A fallback position has always been strong autonomy for the Kurds within the new Iraq. Curiously, the interim constitution states that if any three provinces do not accept the constitution (meaning the amount of autonomy granted to the three) then the new constitution will be invalid. This clause was put into the constitution to satisfy the Kurds with their three provinces. But now it appears that the Sunni Arabs have noted that they dominate another three provinces, and that this clause also gives them a veto.

I would think that a good solution would be to have four regional governments, each with considerable autonomy. These would be the Sunni Arab provinces north and west of Baghdad, the Kurdish provinces in the Northeast, Baghdad itself, and the rest in a large Shi’a province in the center or south. (They may want more, so why not.) Regional governments are always in danger of being crushed by the center or flying off into independent states. So it is how to know how this would play out in the end. But there is a lot of inter-group hostility in the country and this might be a way to assuage it. The hardest problem would be to figure out what to do with the Peshmurga, the very strong militia that the Kurds count on to defend their interests. The Kurds would feel mighty exposed without it. But how would this fit into the new scheme of things?