A while back, the folks at PostGlobal asked what readers thought Iraq would look like in ten years. I guessed that it has a good chance of ending up as a seriously devolved, federalist entity.
On that point, check out this great piece of writing (Brian Brivati, Guardian Unlimited):
"So the Iraq Commission ends in the final broadcast at the LWT office on the South Bank. Jon Snow does his stuff. A studio audience listens in silence. Lee Hamilton is beamed in from the USA to say how splendid it all is and then we all go home to watch it on TV and wake the next morning to a new project. Iraqis, on the other hand, wake up the next morning in a land of infinite contrasts. In the north, in the Kurdistan region, they take a shower, have breakfast, watch the news and go to work. In Baghdad, their water may or may not be running. Their electricity probably does not work. There is a body in the road outside their house. In the south it depends where they are but many will have no job to go to so they will listen to whatever Iranian mullah is preaching hate that morning. And then, somewhere, a terrorist of one of the many, many groups will let off a bomb that kills his fellow Iraqis. Will our commission make any difference to this situation? Well, it will if the British government takes the most important of our recommendations seriously."
and, this, a propos of the Senate's tete-a-tete with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, recently:
Iraqi parliamentarian Mahmoud Othman cautions that many Iraqis still do not understand the concept of federalism. He also wonders if it might be too soon to try to get them to embrace it.
"Somebody who gets up in the morning he has no gas, no electricity, no safety, no food, unemployed, do you think he will listen to you when you talk about federalism or our constitution? It is nonsense. They have been working in the wrong way in this country," said Othman
