Al-Jazeera is reporting
Kurds in northern Iraq are demanding a referendum to make their region sovereign apart from Arab Iraq:
A group of Iraqi Kurds has presented UN officials with a petition signed by 1.7 million Iraqis seeking a referendum on whether northern Iraq should be made an independent Kurdish state.
"The Kurds under international protection have been exercising de facto independence in South Kurdistan [northern Iraq] for the last 13 years and they do not wish to be controlled by an Arab-dominated Iraq," the group said at the United Nation's New York headquaters on Wednesday.
Can Iraq fragment into three states (Kurdish, Sunni, Shia) without civil war?
Timothy Noah made a case for partition last April. Our authority is greatly diminished since then but maybe the Shia and Kurdish parties can work out a deal. The Sunnis are not likely to agree to any deal. But being a long standing oppressive minority they won't get much sympathy from the oppressed majority Shia - what comes around goes around or something like that. About partition:
The third autonomous state created by the breakup of Iraq would be Iraqi Kurdistan. Autonomy is what Iraqi Kurds have long desired, and it's more or less what the No-Fly Zone created by the United States and Britain gave them after Gulf War I. The Kurds have already demonstrated that they can hold free elections and maintain a free press.
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The awkward question, though, is how you grant autonomy to the Kurds while denying it to the Shiites and the Sunnis.
The probable answer is: You can't. But accepting a three-state solution, enclosed inside a loose federation or not, likely means giving up on certain aspirations. One aspiration is to make Iraq a democratic nation. More likely, it would be a two-thirds democratic federation or geographic region, with the possibility of a Sunni democracy down the road. Another aspiration is to establish the rule of law. In the short run, and perhaps even in the long, that would likely happen only in Iraqi Kurdistan. A third aspiration is to stop the killing. But that wouldn't happen in the Sunni territory, though it might happen later. A fourth and final aspiration is to avoid taking a country that was fascist, but not terribly theocratic, and allowing one-third of it to become a theocracy. This hope is not merely idealistic but also, conceivably, related to national security, insofar as the creation of any new Islamic theocracy provides a potential recruiting ground for al-Qaida. But Chatterbox doesn't have any great ideas about how to keep Iraqi Shiites from making that democratic choice. As Galbraith says, maybe they'll hate us less if we let them make that choice sooner rather than later.
It will be interesting to see what happens with the Kurds in northern Iraq. They suffered greatly under Saddam Hussein. They also were sold out by the US after the first Gulf War and slaughtered wholesale while America did nothing to prevent it. Kurds have parallel complaints to Palestinians - chiefly that they are stateless. The Kurdish situation is no less complex, with Turkey and Iran fiercely opposed to a Kurdish state (both have significant Kurdish populations and believe it would cause unrest). Whatever your views on the Iraq War you have to wish the Kurdish people well in the north. Will they finally get their own state?