The trifurcation of Iraq has begun

■"Kurds Vow to Retain Militia as Guardians of Autonomy: An army is 'a symbol of resistance' and an insurance policy," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. A8.

■"Iraq's Serene South Asks, Who Needs Baghdad? Dreams of becoming an Arab Singapore, or a Shiite Kuwait" by James Glanz, New York Times, 27 February 2005, p. WK3.

■"Iraq's dispossessed Sunnis seek new strategy: The relative success of last month's elections has forced the former ruling minority now at the heart of the insurgency to rethink its tactics," by Charles Clover, Financial Times, 26-27 February 2005, p. 4.

The Kurds remind me of the early American colonies just as they were being asked to join a larger federation: a fierce desire to retain their militia. Almost a hundred years later, when the U.S. dissolved into the Civil War, most federal soldiers fought according to where they were fromóthat's how fierce the attachment was. Should we be surprised to see the same thing in Iraq? No. Does the U.S. military rely on these forces to fight the insurgents? You bet. And therein lies the trick: we have to keep just enough of an idea of Iraq going on so that the militias don't see enemies beyond the insurgents. The Kurds fought the Kurds not so long ago, so the idea of militias is a bit dicey. But we have to expect it as the price of federalism in Iraqóas sloppy and as loose as they might end up being for quite some time.

Meanwhile, down south, there are some pretty out-in-the-open dreams about breaking off from the Sunni and Kurdish north. Some of this is a desire to take their oil and leave, which is natural, and some of it is desiring to be away from the real and potential violence elsewhere in Iraq, and that's even more natural. Being built around the port of Basra, there is likewise a stronger desire to connect up with the outside world. The election showing of the Shiite coalition will dampen this some, as the article points out, but it ain't going to go away. We're watching the same dynamics, often economically driven more than by ethnicity or religion, that dismembered the false state that was Yugoslavia. Iraq is a similarly odd historical creation by outsiders (Churchill had a big hand), and it may well have to devolve into smaller bits before it can come back together in larger ones.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, the Sunnis are fighting on and thinking on the results that were the national election last month. The narrowing solution, as I called it in the Esquire piece, is becoming abundantly clear: join or be left behind, because the Kurds and the Shiites aren't going to stand still, and they're not going to wait on the violence. Yes, some Sunnis want to bargain, but as the FT article points out, you can't really do that until you have a central government in place. So the process has to keep rolling. The system has to be built.