Iraq's Real Challenge: A Constitution with a Birth Defect

Iraq’s Real Challenge: A Constitution with a Birth Defect

Posted: November 12th, 2017

By Lukman Faily

Lukman Faily was the Iraqi Ambassador to the United States in 2013–2016. He also served as Iraq’s Ambassador to Japan from 2010–2013. Prior to his ambassadorial posts, he held senior positions as Program Manager in the information technology sectors of several large trans-national companies in the UK. He has more than three decades’ experience in community work and political activism among the Iraqi diaspora in the UK.

The Sept. 25 Kurdish referendum has risked permanent damage to the relationship between the Kurdish Regional Government and the Iraqi government (GOI), but the blame may lie as much with inequities built into the structure of the Iraqi constitution as with the independent-minded Kurds.

The Iraqi constitution of 2005 and its very definition of the state has failed to empower its stakeholders or serve as an adjudicator of disputes within the state of Iraq. This most recent crisis is a golden opportunity to discuss the key structural fault-lines that have been either ignored or wrongly implemented. These fault-lines relate to decentralization, revenue sharing, the role of religion and other important identity and governance challenges.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+