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In the wake of World War I, the Arab lands were detached from the Ottoman Empire and distributed, like spoils, among the victors. Fierce resistance to this European colonization forced a process of decolonization starting as early as the 1920s. As a result, the area was converted into many countries, which form the bulk of today's Middle East. One of such new additions to the world map was Iraq, which the Ottomans ruled as three separate provinces, each of which was called a vilayat : Musol, Baghdad, and Basra. Hence, many scholars of the region have come to the conclusion that Iraq is an "artificial state" with no natural bond to keep it united.
The Future of Iraq is one of the recent works that advances this argument. The book calls for a three-way partition of the country if peace and prosperity are to prevail because Iraq is "a state which should not have been formed in the first place ... [and] there simply is no other way to ensure [its] territorial integrity" other than partition or rule by violence and dictatorship (p. 182). Among the many flaws of this argument, two are very glaring. First, there are no clear points of territorial partitioning. There are more than a million Kurds in the Arab territories, hundreds of thousands of...