Understanding Iraq today and what it will devolve into in the years ahead.

By Rob Janicki

It must be remembered that the Iraq of today is a fictional creation by European countries after World War I.  It did not take into account the historical nature of the three competing ethnic and religious groups within the boundaries of the artificial construction.  Essentially, Iraq became a pressure cooker for all the historical animosities within these three groups.  It was destined to fail and that failure is now here as it is being brought to an historical crisis point and breakup courtesy of ISIS.

Expect to see Iraq break up into three distinct ethnic and religious nation states.  The Kurdish region in northern Iraq is, for all intents and purposes, already an autonomous nation of Kurdistan operating on its own outside of any real control and/or support from the capital in Baghdad.

The largest religious group in Iraq are the Shiites and they are located in eastern and southern Iraq.  They will remain the dominant force in what will become the new Shiite Iraq.  Shiites constitute well over 60% of Iraqis today.  They were mercilessly subjugated by the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein, a religious minority then and today in Iraq, which only acted to heighten the historical animosity between Shiites and Sunnis.

Geographically, traditional Sunni territory constitutes the western one-third of Iraq today.  That region will become some kind of an autonomous nation state at an undetermined time in the future.  This depends upon the disposition of the terrorists of ISIS in the future.  ISIS will fail in the future as they try to transition from a group of brutal and savage terrorists operating on an ad hoc basis to a nation state requiring stability to exist.  Being guided by a seventh century interpretation of Islam will simply not work in today's world for an Islamic Caliphate, no matter how much it is wished for by these inhuman savages of ISIS. 

Arab neighbors will not let ISIS exist on any permanent basis.  ISIS constitutes a continuing base for the export of terrorism destabilizing the entire region.  ISIS actually stands in the way of the Arab neighborhood pushing back on the growing influence of Iran in Iraq and the entire region.  The Arab nations in the region want to defeat ISIS so they can concentrate on containing Iran's influence in the region, which is the world's largest exporter of terrorism and which stands to destabilize the various monarchies in the region as it seeks to gain hegemony over the entire Middle East.

The irony of this situation is that Vice President Joe Biden, at one time prior to the U.S. departure from Iraq in 2011, suggested that Iraq be partitioned into three separate states, as described above.  Was Joe prescient or were his comments similar to that of a blind squirrel that will occasionally come across a random nut by accident.  I'm thinking Joe just managed, like the proverbial blind squirrel, to inadvertently come across a kernel of insight in his otherwise usual disjointed ramblings.