Iraq: Good News From Kurdistan

There is precious little good news out of Iraq, and what there is seems to last only as long as the next mosque bombing. But things seem to be humming along rather nicely in the Kurdish north.

This is so for reasons that I've noted before, chief among them that since the end of the first Gulf War the Kurds have been more or less masters of their own destiny (and willing to institute some important reforms on their own), and with help from the U.S. Air Force, the Kurdish peshmerga have pretty much cleansed their homeland of the terrorists that bedevil the south.

Jonathan Dworkin, a medical student in his final year at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, has been travelling in Iraqi Kurdistan since January. Although he is way too simplistic in arguing that liberal democracies are possible in the region, his posts at The Washington Monthly have been insightful.

Now if only some of the lessons learned in Kurdistan could be applied in Iraq at large.