Is Iraq facing disintegration like former Yugoslavia? Can it survive as a centralised state? Or will it hold together like India, Belgium, Canada and Spain where federal constitutional structures were successfully created to handle major differences in ethnicity and culture?
Events this past week have brought these stark alternatives into high relief, as Iraqis voted in a constitutional referendum, witnessed the dramatic opening of Saddam Hussein's trial and endured yet more deaths, violence and kidnappings arising from these conflicts and resistance to foreign occupation. For Irish people these issues were dramatised by the kidnap and release of the journalist Rory Carroll and by details emerging about the way it happened.
It is too soon to answer the big questions about Iraq's likely destiny as between disintegration, centralism or federalisation. But it is essential to recognise they are there and that there is little time to decide between them. Visiting Iraq this week for the first time since the US-led invasion in 2003, Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, said he sees no strategy to reconcile the country's different communities. Civil war could erupt at any moment. He reflects deep disquiet in the Arab world about Iraq's identity. It is echoed most clearly in the fears expressed by Sunni leaders there that they will be marginalised politically and culturally in a loose federal entity. Since most of the surrounding Arab states are also Sunni, they fear the prospect of extensive Kurdish and southern Shia autonomy and the likelihood that Iran will be the main regional beneficiary.
This, of course, is not the whole story. The compromise reached on the constitution will allow it to be further deliberated and amended after the new Iraqi parliament is elected on December 15th - assuming it is passed when results are announced in the next few days. Turnout was higher than in last January's elections, including among Sunnis, and several influential Sunni leaders and parties have now said they will participate in the political process rather than pursue the path of military resistance. That is good news - but no guarantee that a solution to the basic conundrum of how to hold such a diverse country together can readily be found. It was created from three disparate provinces of the Ottoman empire by the British in the 1920s and held together since then only by an iron fist - usually a Sunni one, as was also the case during Saddam's dictatorship.
Arab disquiet has to do not only with Iraq's cultural identity but with the knock-on effects of its potential democratisation. To use the term is not to accept the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion but to recognise the genuine political progress that has been made by Iraqi citizens and leaders - despite the dreadful disorder and everyday chaos they have suffered and the continuing insurgency against foreign occupation. But unless a timetable for the withdrawal of these troops is agreed alongside a constitutional settlement the Yugoslav scenario looks more credible than the Indian one.