More Stray Iraq Thoughts
One of the reasons commonly given for the impossibility of petitioning Iraq along ethnic/sectarian lines is that it would leave the Sunni section a landlocked, oil-free wasteland, a kind of surlier Jordan. I think “Sunnaq” would have a more arable land than Jordan, and there are plenty of theorists who view oil wealth as something of a political curse, but that doesn’t mean Sunnaq would want to do without. But if the will were otherwise there, it should be possible to give Kurdaq the oil fields around either Kirkuk or Mosul and Sunnaq the ones around Mosul or Kirkuk. Both cities and regions are contested, so “each gets one” is an imaginable compromise.
That just leaves a few other nagging problems, like Iraq’s Sunnis not wanting to give away everything else in partition, the Kurds wanting “the whole schmear” (Mosul AND Kirkuk), the thoroughgoing ethnic intermingling in Baghdad (largest Kurdish population in Iraq, IIRC) and the apparent lack of enthusiasm for partition among the vast majority of Iraqis. Oh well.
