First, if there is one thing that the history of the Middle East from the time of the Sykes-Picot Agreement has taught us, it is: drawing boundaries in the Middle East can be a very risky business. These boundaries can end up being quite arbitrary. The simple act of demarcating a geographic area does not mean that you are also going to end up with a religious or ethnically homogeneous population inside that area. Consider, for example, the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, which, although predominantly Kurdish, has large populations of Sunnis and Turkmen. Should this city be assigned to the new Kurdistan and all the Sunnis and Turkmen expelled? If the Sunnis and Turkmen are not expelled, then how will their interests be represented in a predominantly Kurdish government?
Furthermore, the geographic area you carve out for a particular group may not be the area that group wants to occupy -- in particular if there are petroleum assets in one geographic area and not in another.
Finally, establishing boundaries is no guarantee of peace. A relatively well-defined boundary existed between Iraq and Iran, but that boundary did not prevent Iraq and Iran from going to war at a cost of more than a million lives.
Regarding the difficulty of drawing boundaries, one needs only to observe how difficult it has been to draw boundaries between Israel and a Palestinian state. In sum, the various proposals to draw boundaries to partition Iraq into three states are anything but a panacea.
Instead of dividing Iraq up into separate geographic regions on the assumption that these regions are going to contain relatively homogenous ethnic and religious groups, it seems to me instead that an imperial government needs to be created in which the interests of all political and religious groups are represented, even if those groups are minorities and regardless of where the members of those groups are geographically dispersed. That is, a better model may be provided by the old Ottoman Empire, where millets represented the interests of various religious groups no matter where the members of those groups lived. An individual of a particular religion was a member of a particular millet. The members of the millet had a large degree of autonomy in organizing their own legal, political, and religious affairs. They were free to choose their own political and religious leaders. Above the millets, however, there stood an imperial power, to which the millets owed allegiance and paid taxes. This imperial power also mediated disputes between the various millets. Such an arrangement would avoid the issue of drawing new boundaries entirely. Instead, an individual of a particular religious creed and/or ethnic group, regardless of where he lived geographically, would have representation and recourse through the leadership of his own millet. This leadership of the millet would interface with the imperial power to try advance the goals of his community.
On the other hand, the single biggest problem with proposals either for a.) partitioning Iraq into three separate geographic regions or b.) for establishing an imperial government above a millet system is the assumption that there is an external power – either a single superpower like the US or a multi-national organization like the United Nations – that is powerful enough and willing to do what it takes to enforce the imposition of a solution that will be accepted by all parties involved. Why should we think that ISIS, which has been very successful at seizing territory through military force, gives a good goddamn about what boundaries the US thinks is appropriate for Sunnis or about the feasibility of Sunni representation through a millet? And if ISIS continues to succeed militarily and the US is unhappy with its success, the only way for the US to restrain ISIS is through the use of military force. But, it is entirely unclear to what extent the US is prepared to use military force against ISIS (or any other party in Iraq) right now.
We had our opportunity to influence the situation in Iraq when we had troops on the ground. We had made many mistakes, but were making progress. Then, President Obama withdrew all American forces from Iraq. We now have two alternatives: either we must re-insert a large American force of combat troops back into Iraq to control the situation – and possibly to serve as or establish some kind of federal super-government for Iraq (partitioned or organized into millet-like sub-groups); or we need to stand aside, not take sides, and let the parties involved, the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds fight it out among themselves until they arrive at some kind of equilibrium – and possibly new boundaries – on their own.
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