By the time you read this column, the last American soldiers probably will have left Iraq. Many of us worry that they left too soon, and the first indicators do not seem particularly positive. Before the very last group of U.S. soldiers crossed out of Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government put out an arrest warrant for Iraqi Vice-President Tariq al-Hashimi. Prime Minister Maliki also appears to be trying to sack his deputy Prime Minister, Saleh al-Mutlak.

Both Mr. Hashimi and Mr. Mutlak are prominent Sunni Arab leaders with the Iraqiya political bloc. Mr. Hashimi stands accused of ordering his bodyguards to conduct assassination campaigns against other [Shiite] government officials, while Mutlak is accused of the less serious offenses of “not believing in Iraq” and being “incompetent.” As I write this, Mr. Hashimi is in Kurdistan, where authorities in Baghdad will not be able to pursue him unless the Kurdistan Regional Government agrees to arrest him on their behalf.

Whatever the truth of the accusations against Hashimi and Mutlak, these recent developments give a clear impression of a country divided beyond repair. Sunni Arabs feel like Shiite leaders in Baghdad couldn’t even wait for the last American soldier to leave before declaring, with Iranian prodding, the re-opening of hunting season against them. The Kurds, meanwhile, still wait for the government in Baghdad to fulfill its promises to them regarding disputed territories, the hydrocarbons law and other important matters.

Many would like to blame all of this on the departing Americans. They accuse Washington of making grave errors when it formed the first Interim Governing Council of Iraq based on proportional sectarian representation (Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians and a token Turkoman or two) and when it supported a 2005 Constitution that enshrined a very decentralized Federal system for Iraq’s new government. Even media in the United States, led by The New York Times, seems intent on painting these choices as errors that condemned Iraq’s future.

These critics are wrong, again. In 2003, forming an interim government that included Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Sunni Shiites and others in rough proportion to their overall population created the most inclusive government Iraq had ever seen. After some eighty years of dictatorship, the “sectarian quotas” were the best guess anyone could come up with in order to do this – the least bad of several poor options in the limited time available then. In election after election, Iraqis voted along sectarian lines and confirmed the system themselves. It seems a little too far fetched to blame the Iraqi masses’ votes, time and time again, on the way Americans (with many Iraqis’ input) decided to form Iraq’s provisional government in 2003. If Iraqi Arabs are such non-sectarian Iraqi nationalists as so many claim them to be, they easily could have voted differently. Too many observers listen to Iraqi Arabs talking the Iraqi nationalist talk, which is the polite thing to do in Arab parts of Iraq, but fail to see most of them walking the sectarian walk.

This leads us to the second issue: decentralization and federalism. Limiting the amount of power concentrated in Baghdad gave Iraqis, so divided along sectarian lines, their best chance at democracy. Only by having enough autonomy in their own region can people in Kurdistan resign themselves to never leading the government in Baghdad (the ceremonial post of president notwithstanding). Reducing the “all or nothing” struggle for power in the center left all Iraqis the room for the kind of shared governance that democracy needs in Iraq. The only other option for a stable Iraq would involve pre-2003 style authoritarian rule, which no one should call a successful state.

Sunni Arabs finally began to realize this as well, and many of them are now calling for the formation of a region of their own. Back when they deluded themselves into thinking they could again run things in Baghdad, Sunni Arab leaders called for a strong central government, just as many Shiite Arab “Iraqi nationalists” do now. In case they needed one more reminder as to why a strong central government is a bad idea, Sunnis got it with Hashimi’s arrest warrant. They already knew how things were going, of course, when Baghdad kept failing to incorporate their Awakening Councils into the official security force structure as promised, or when de-Baathification was used as an excuse to go after Sunni Arabs of every stripe and colour, or when any number of choices about money and power were made. All the while, everyone kept saying all the right things about how religious sect or ethnicity does not matter and “we are all Iraqis.”

If a now fully sovereign Iraq is to have a chance at stability and democracy, Iraqis will have to hang on to decentralization like the lifeline that it is. Every community will need to refrain from pursuing risky maximalist strategies. For the Kurds, this means not sending their peshmerga south and trying to settle the disputed territories issue forcefully. For the Shiites, this means genuinely sharing power (with non-Shiite groups as well as between different Shiite political groupings) and respecting the Constitution’s provisions regarding decentralization. For the Sunnis, this means not trying to overturn the whole table with a return to the insurgency of a few years ago.

If Iraq’s most important political actors can restrain their ambitions in this minimal way, the state has a chance. Iraq has a chance at a stable, democratic future, only because the Kurds insisted on representation and decentralized federalism back in 2003. If the Iraqi state fails, it will have died at the hands of Iraqi Arabs themselves. If that happens, the usual critics will blame the Kurds and the Americans, of course. They can’t seem to realize that right now, it’s mostly up to Shiite Arab leaders in Baghdad to make the most of this opportunity that the Kurds and Americans gave them, or fall even further under Iranian influence and ruin the infant new state they just inherited. If Iraq thus fails the Kurds rather than vice-versa, the international community will have a duty to support Kurdish secession.