Cranes swivel across a skyline whose glittering high-rises and five-star hotels bring an air of Dubai grandeur. Modern malls with brightly lit boutiques do a brisk business. Modern, wide highways include pedestrian bridges, some with escalators.

This is Iraqi Kurdistan, a region that was semiautonomous even under Saddam Hussein, but one that has been transformed in remarkable ways since the American invasion of 2003. While the rest of Iraq remains saddled by scars and trauma from the conflicts the U.S. invasion unleashed, the Kurdistan region increasingly stands apart, with its own fractious, impoverished past mostly a distant memory.

But Kurdistan can only be held up as a success story with significant caveats. Security has come at the expense of the repressive features of a police state. Two ruling political parties have held on to power through a vast network of patronage that has given the opposition little breathing room…

“The Kurdistan region, in terms of development and economic growth, has the potential to become the Iraq the U.S. had hoped for the entire country,” said Denise Natali, a National Defense University professor who has studied the Kurds for decades.