What Americans need to realize is that, in contrast with Vietnam and Korea, which have solid long histories of population by a dominant single ethnic group, "Iraq" is an aritificial "nation", created at the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire in WWI largely by a group of Brits drawing lines on a map, with the aid of good brandy and cigars. It took into account nothing of the ethnic/religious/cultural subdivisions of the region, and was held together largely by brutal despotisms of one kind or another for eighty-plus years. It has the cohesiveness of a dust-bunny.
We Americans tend to think of "nations" in terms of maps and boundaries. That's a fairly new development in human history, dating back really only a couple centuries or so, in the Middle East, even less. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and (God knows) Israel, are all creations of 20th Century politics. In the past 20 years we have seen the creation or resurrection of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Moldova, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Macedonia, Croatia, Kazakhstan, (thank you, Borat), Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kadjikistan as independent nation-states. Why should the idea of an independent Kurdistan and other subdivisions of this region of desert now known as "Iraq" be out of consideration?
caw