THERE IS NO IRAQ:

The Kurds in the north, who make up roughly twenty percent of the population, want out. They never wished to be part of Iraq in the first place. To this day, they still call the bathroom the "Winston Churchill," in sarcastic homage to the former British prime minister who shackled them to Baghdad. Since the early 1990s, they've had their own government and autonomous region in the northern three provinces, and they held a referendum in 2005 in which 98.7 percent voted to secede and declare independence. The only reason they haven't finally pulled the trigger is because it hasn't been safe; the Turks--who fear the contagion of Kurdish independence inside their own country--have threatened to invade if they did.

The Sunni Arabs in the west, who make up another rough twenty percent of Iraq, aren't itching for independence necessarily, but they sure as hell aren't willing to live under the thumb of Shiite-dominated Baghdad any longer. Millions of them live now under the brutal totalitarian rule of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has declared its own state not only in a huge swath of Iraq but also in much of northeastern Syria. ISIS either controls or has a large presence in more than fifty percent of Iraq at the time of this writing.

Iraq's Shiite majority, meanwhile, is terrified of its Sunni minority, which oppressed them mercilessly during Saddam Hussein's terrifying rule and which now flies the black flag of al-Qaeda and promises unending massacres.

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