The Iraqi Kurdish View on Federalism: Not Just for the Kurds

  • David Romano
Chapter

Abstract

Until the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq, the country stood out as one of the most authoritarian on earth. The title of Kanan Makiya’s 1989 book, Republic of Fear, captured the prevailing sentiment regarding Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime.1 Freedom House’s 2002 ranking for Iraq was 7 in all three categories of “political freedom,” “civil liberties,” and “political rights” (7 represents the worst ranking on a scale of 1–7).2 In 1987 and 1988, Saddam’s regime in Baghdad went so far as to mount a campaign of genocide against Iraqi Kurds, massacring some 180,000 of them, razing some 4,000 villages to the ground, and dropping chemical weapons on many of their towns (the most well-known instance of which occurred in the city of Halabja).3 The removal of Ba’athist tyranny in 2003 offered the first real possibility of changing the authoritarian dynamic in Iraq. At the same time, there remained the very real risk that one regime’s authoritarianism would simply be replaced by another’s. In 2003, Toby Dodge warned that US administrators, “short of resources and time because of American domestic pressures,” would be tempted to “restore the old ruling formula, foreclosing any real attempt at effective reform.”4 By the time the United States withdrew the last of its military forces from Iraq in December of 2011, however, it seemed clear that they had not restored “the old ruling formula.” Nor did they originally leave behind a Shiite Arab tyranny to replace the former Sunni Arab one.

Keywords

Central Government Prime Minister Dispute Territory Power Sharing Kurdistan Region 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).Google Scholar
  2. 4.
    Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 170.Google Scholar
  3. 5.
    Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), chapter 10.Google Scholar
  4. 6.
    Brendan O’Leary, How to Get out of Iraq with Integrity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 110–111. O’Leary does not mention the American preference regarding Sharia’ here, however.Google Scholar
  5. 9.
    Larry Jay Diamond and Leonardo Morlino, “The Quality of Democracy: An Overview,” Journal of Democracy 15.4 (2004), pp. 20–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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    See, for instance, Nussaibah Younis, “Set Up to Fail: Consociational Political Structures in Post-War Iraq, 2003–2010,” Contemporary Arab Affairs 4 (January–March 2011), pp. 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. 12.
    For a more detailed discussion of how liberal consociation (as opposed to “corporate consociation” or an “integrationist” approach) benefits Iraq, see John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, “Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: Liberal Consociation as Political Prescription,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5.4 (2007), pp. 670–698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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  10. 21.
    Sean Kane, Joost R. Hiltermann, and Raad Alkadiri, “Iraq’s Federalism Quandary” (March/April 2012), p. 23, http://nationalinterest.org/article/iraqs-federalism-quandary-6512. Mockaitis offers a different take on the issue than the opinion presented here, however, insisting that the majority of Iraqis (rather than just the Kurds) did in fact support the creation of a very weak central government in Baghdad (pp. 291–292).Google Scholar
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  12. 22.
    Mehmet Gurses, “Partition, Democracy, and Turkey’s Kurdish Minority,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 16.3 (2010), p. 340.Google Scholar
  13. 23.
    For a discussion of various forms of federalism and their suitability, or lack thereof, to the Iraqi context, see Brendan O’Leary, “Power Sharing, Pluralist Federation, and Federacy,” in O’Leary, Brendan, John McGarry, and Khaled Salih (eds.) The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).Google Scholar
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    Matthew S. Mingus, “Progress and Challenges with Iraq’s Multilevel Governance,” Public Administration Review 72.5 (2012), p. 685.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 34.
    For a more detailed discussion of the disputed territories issue, as well as prescription for its possible resolution, see Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 49.
    Possibilities are described in greater detail in Reidar Visser and Gareth Stansfield (eds.) An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy? (London: Hurst, 2007).Google Scholar
  17. 52.
    Mehmet Gurses and T. David Mason, “Democracy out of Anarchy: The Prospects for Post-Civil-War Democracy,” Social Science Quarterly 89 (June 2008), p. 315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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© David Romano and Mehmet Gurses 2014

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  • David Romano

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