Now that Kurdistan is once again being targeted for suicide-bombings, what are the chances that this pluralist, democratic statelet will not want to secede entirely from Iraq and seal off its borders once and for all? (That'll play about as well in Baghdad as it well in Ankara, but if self-determination has ever been earned by a people, the Kurds have earned theirs.)
And given how paltry the Iraqi Oil Ministry is being about divvying up oil that should, by rights, belong to the Kurds, I'd say there's a good chance of secession — an option granted to the KRG in Iraq's constitution:
[T]he Iraqi Oil Ministry, at a meeting it set up last month in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, with other Iraqi oil experts and politicians, unveiled the annexes to the hydrocarbons law — its list distributing control of oil fields between central and KRG control — and a law re-establishing the Iraq National Oil Co., which Kurdish leadership automatically rejected.
"This sets us back to square one, a point that's unacceptable to us. We're trying to modernize Iraq, build a new Iraq, built on new foundations, new policies. The symbol of this new Iraq will be how it manages its oil infrastructure," Talabani said. "And if people want to revert back to Saddam-era policies of a state-controlled oil sector with no accountability, with no accountability to the Parliament or the people of the country, with no oversight except from by one or two, then I'm sorry, that is not the Iraq that the Kurds bought into. That is not the Iraq that the Kurds would want to be part of."
"If a centralized oil regime is imposed on us, we will not participate in the state of Iraq," Talabani said. "And we have to make it absolutely clear to our friends in Washington, to our brothers in Baghdad, this is a make-or-break deal for Iraq."