Here’s some­thing you won’t find any­where else. (I googled.) These are the scanned copies of the pro­posed con­sti­tu­tions for Iraq, post-Saddam. Sami Abdul Rah­man, the deputy prime min­is­ter (KDP) of the Kur­dis­tan Regional Gov­ern­ment, gave them to me after I inter­viewed him in his offices in the Par­lia­ment build­ing in Arbil. He wrote them, and the KDP and PUK, in a rare show of pub­lic unity, have signed on. Even State, back in July, said the ideas were “inter­est­ing.“
There are two files, the pro­posed con­sti­tu­tion for a Fed­eral Repub­lic of Iraq (3.0MB), heav­ily mod­eled on the United States Con­sti­tu­tion, and the con­sti­tu­tion for the Kur­dish region (5.6MB). Sorry for the size of the files. I tried to make them as small as I could.
The first one maps out a plan that would divide the coun­try into two regions: The Arabs would get the mid­dle and south­ern regions along with the province of Nin­eveh (except­ing regions that have Kur­dish majori­ties) and the Kurds would get the provinces of Kirkuk, Suleimaniya, Arbil and Duhok, the dis­tricts of Aqra, Sheihkan and Sin­jar and the sub-districts of Zimar (in Nin­eveh), Khaniqin and Man­dali (Diyala) and Badra (in the province of Al-Wasit.) Unlike the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, how­ever, there is a state reli­gion — Islam — and offi­cial lan­guages (Kur­dish in the Kur­dish regions and Ara­bic in the other.)
There is a lib­eral col­lec­tion of rights granted, but a wor­ri­some depen­dence on “the law,” as in, “No one can be cap­tured, detained, jailed, or searched except in cir­cum­stances defined in law.” This loop­hole is scat­tered through­out the doc­u­ment, sub­or­di­nat­ing the con­sti­tu­tions to what­ever the regional or national leg­is­la­tures want to write into the law­books. Instead of being the supreme law of the land, as in the United States, the con­sti­tu­tions instead pro­vide jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for, say, the harsh rule of shar’ia, should Islamists gain con­trol over the National Assem­bly.
And while “power is inher­ent in the peo­ple as they are the source of its legit­macy,” I worry that this draft is too weak to pro­tect the peo­ple of Iraq (and par­tic­u­larly the Kurds) from democ­racy gone bad. Jef­fer­son­ian these doc­u­ments ain’t.
There’s also a lot that will piss off the Turks, mak­ing the adop­tion of this char­ter less than likely. The Kurds blame much of Iraq’s (and by exten­sion their own) mis­for­tunes on the cen­tral­iza­tion of power in Iraq. This is exactly the prob­lem in Turkey and while a few Turk­ish intel­lec­tu­als have floated the idea of a fed­eral struc­ture in Turkey, that idea has about as much of a chance as Sad­dam does of win­ning another war and occu­py­ing Wash­ing­ton.
As the pre­am­ble says:

Cen­tral­iza­tion in gov­ern­ment has lost its appeal even within sim­ple and homoge­nous com­mu­ni­ties. It has espe­cially lost its ratio­nale for being resorted to in com­mu­ni­ties that are of a plu­ral­ist nature made up of var­i­ous nation­al­i­ties, reli­gious groups and lan­guages, such as the Iraqi [Ed: And Turk­ish] com­mu­nity. The high degree of cen­tral­iza­tion and the indif­fer­ence of deci­sion mak­ers to the pres­ence of the spe­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Kur­dish peo­ple are among the basic rea­sons for the Kurds being deprived of their legit­i­mate rights under suc­ces­sive Iraqi gov­ern­ments, which came to power under both the monar­chy and the repub­lic. This style of restrict­ing author­ity in t he cen­tre and the unwill­ing­ness to share it with the Kurds on a prac­ti­cal basis, even after the March 11, 1970 auton­omy agree­ment has been the hall­mark of the role of the Iraqi state.

Well, yeah, and Sad­dam mur­der­ing inno­cent women and chil­dren with chem­i­cal weapons has also been a “hall­mark of the role of the Iraqi state.” Harp­ing on the evils cen­tral­iza­tion and the fail­ure to rec­og­nize the spe­cial nature of Kurds — which is exactly what has been hap­pen­ing in Turkey since 1921 — is ask­ing for trou­ble, if you ask me. Every crit­i­cism men­tioned in the pre­am­ble against Iraq could equally be lev­eled at Turkey. (Except the Turks haven’t bombed vil­lages with afla­toxin or other weapons of mass destruc­tion.) And Turkey has been growl­ing that any deal that leaves the Kurds with inde­pen­dence, either de facto or de jure, will be met with guns and tanks. And I have no idea what the United States, as the new regional power­bro­ker, would do if a NATO ally began oper­a­tions in the area Amer­ica claims as con­quered territory.