Departing Responsibly

In the left-wing American magazine, Dissent Brendan O Leary examines American options and argues the need to support a successful federation rather than a failed transfer of power, one in which the United States, with bungled intentions, assists divided Arab centralists in Baghdad to go to war with Kurdistan and with each other.

The author examines fraught relations between Baghdad and the Kurds. He advised the Iraqi Kurds before they and the rest of Iraq agreed the new Iraqi constitution in 2005 of which he says - The Constitution of 2005, ratified by four out of five voters in a UN-validated referendum, re-structured British-made Iraq as a voluntary union of its constituent peoples. It proclaims, on paper, a pluralist federation, maps the path toward different and flexible forms of decentralization, and creates multiple incentives for power sharing within a deliberately weak federal government. It remade Iraq as a parliamentary democracy—enabling its Shiite Arab majority to express itself as such, though subject to constitutional restraints, the most important of which lie in the formal strengthening of regions or provinces (governorates) at the expense of what until 2003 had been a series of despotisms in Baghdad.