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The Bush administration has decided to let the semiautonomous Kurdish government remain as part of a newly sovereign Iraq despite warnings from Iraq's neighbors and many Iraqis not to divide the country into ethnic states[...]
The officials said that their new position on the Kurdish state was effectively dictated by the Nov. 15 accord with Iraqi leaders that established June 30 as the target date for Iraqi self-rule. Such a rapid timetable, they said, has left no time to change the identity of the Kurdish stronghold in the north, as many had originally wanted.
Administration and Iraqi officials insist that leaving the Kurdish autonomous region intact does not preclude Iraq's consolidating itself without ethnic states in the future when Iraq writes its constitution. Indeed, the Bush administration plans to continue to press Iraq not to divide itself permanently along ethnic lines, officials say.
Some academic experts have suggested that Iraq should be divided into a Kurdish enclave in the north, a Sunni one in the center and a Shiite one in the south. But this idea has little support with the Iraqi Governing Council and none with the United States.
"You know what the largest Kurdish city in Iraq is?" Istrabadi asked. "It's Baghdad. It isn't like you could draw a line in Iraq and say the Kurds live here or the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, or the Turkmans or the Shiites or the Sunnis live there. In the supposedly Shiite south, there are a million Sunnis in Basra."
Originally posted by djohnsto77
marg, the U.S. has never advocated a totally independant Kurdistan.