The good news: Iraq finally formed a government, more than nine months after its national elections. The bad news: It looks like another season of cliquishness among sectarian lines. That’s no great surprise, though, as Iraq is politically divided along sectarian and ancestry rather than governing philosophies, as is usually the case with Western democracies. That’s why the new government will have legitimacy, because it actually represents the country as a whole. The question remains, though, whether that legitimacy will eventually evolve Iraq from a three-sector conglomerate of sectarian interests into a sense of positive nationalism:

That has been the problem in Iraq since its creation in the wake of World War I. The background on Iraq’s general instability can be found in two excellent books that address the shortcomings of the Versailles process and product: A Peace to End All Peace, 20th Anniversary Edition: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin, and A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today by David Adelman. The two books come at it from different points of view, with Adelman’s approach being more comprehensive and with a particular point of view, and Fromkin more focused on the Middle East. If you haven’t read these books, it’s easy to miss some of the nuances involved and the patterns that repeat in this region.

Can Iraq overcome the defects of its creation and come together as a coherent nation? We’ll see, and this is a good step in that direction, but only one step — and long overdue. The new governing class in Iraq needs to get a lot more competent in forming governments than they have been thus far if they are to succeed as a single, coherent nation.