The puzzle of federalism in Iraq

"An Iraq of Its Regions" has many excellent essays which concerns the relationship between Iraq's geographical constitution, social and political identity. One of its essay says that the traditional conceptual prism is an "Orientalist" as it focuses on Iraq's three dominant communal groups with the Sunni Arabs, Shi'i Arabs and Kurds. Iraq should be analyzed as a mixture of different regions as regional identities are often compared with ethnic identities. An essay from Alistair Northedge speaks about the classical Arab understandings of the idea of Iraq while Reidar Visser talks about "the two regions of Southern Iraq" in that envisioning a single Shi'i state will bring no legacy. However, the readers of "An Iraq of Its Region" is left puzzled as there is a problem on the notions of "region" and "regional federalism" in that they are loosely defined in the Iraqi constitution of 2005. Another problem of it is that it advocates greater conceptual and methodological pluralism and provided little information on what Iraqis feel about regional federalism.