Breaking Away

With time, Arab Iraq is looking less and less like a country, and Kurdish Iraq is looking more and more like one. Since 2003, Kurdish negotiators have quietly compelled Baghdad to acknowledge the Kurdish parliament, ministries, and 100,000-strong peshmerga army—in effect, to let the Kurds be Kurds first and Iraqis second, if at all.

As a method for unmaking Iraq, patient political maneuvering has served the Kurds well—certainly better than the grisly carnival of fanaticism and killing that’s taken place throughout the rest of the country. But the stately drift of Kurdistan away from the rest of Iraq may be nearing its end. The problem is one of territory.

The official border of Iraq’s Kurdistan region roughly follows the outline of three Iraqi provinces (Dohuk, Erbil, and Sulaimaniya) populated almost exclusively by Kurds. But it contains almost none of the Kurdish-majority territory ...