The ancient Greeks might have said that Iraqi Kurdish president Masoud Barzani was a victim of hubris, of arrogant overconfidence. Yet his calling of the 25 September independence referendum was in fact the act of an incompetent leader, whose subsequent resignation should not be regretted, even by his most ardent supporters.

Before making such a fatal move, an adroit politician would have ensured that he was not leading his people into an international vacuum. He would have lined up at least some countries to support his independence bid. He would also have taken care to try and sell the case to the seriously-concerned minorities within the territory over which he held sway. These included Turkmen and Yazidi communities to say nothing of the Arab minority, particularly in the important city of Kirkuk, the control of which was disputed with the government in Baghdad.

It was also a no-brainer that Barzani should have been sure of the support of the rival Talabani faction among the Kurds, with whom his people had fought a bitter three-year civil war until 1997. After up to 8,000 deaths, the territory was effectively divided between the two clans, Barzani’s people ruling from the autonomous region’s capital Irbil and the Talabanis from Sulaymaniyah in the east.

Barzani was also guilty of ignoring the perilous financial future of the independent Kurdistan that he wanted. Since the ouster of Saddam Hussein the region had, by encouraging international investors who were not risk-adverse, managed oil exports of some 600,000 barrels per day, most of it shipped through a 970 km pipeline through Turkey that Saddam had established to avoid a blockade of Iraqi oil exports through the Gulf.

A third of this output came from the fields around Kirkuk, which Kurdish forces had occupied and controlled since 2003. Though Turkey benefited from this pipeline, taking crude for its own refineries against transit fees and earning from port charges at the export terminal at Ceyhan, an independent Kurdistan would have had its economic jugular always inches away from the Turkish knife. With Turkey fighting its own Kurdish rebels of the PKK, who regularly retreat to the mountains of Kurdish Iraq, Ankara had absolutely no appetite for any independent Kurdish state.

In his tearful resignation speech on Sunday, Barzani blamed “the traitors” in the Pershmerga forces who retreated from Kirkuk and its oil field with hardly a shot after Baghdad sent in government forces. History will very probably actually mark these fighters as heroes who avoided drawing yet another bloodbath in a country already scarred with terrible violence.

It is notable that although Iraqi troops defaced Barzani posters and tore down a huge Kurdish flag, they did not order the removal of all such banners. And indeed the Kurds who stayed in Kirkuk offered a genuine welcome to the government forces because they were fed up with fighting and saw no prospect of a successful breakaway Kurdistan.

The new Kurdish leadership in Irbil must disown the independence referendum. They will also be under considerable pressure to acknowledge Iraqi ownership of the oil in the autonomous region. But for its part, Baghdad needs to behave with the same wisdom that it showed as its triumphant soldiers took over Kirkuk, a wisdom that the humiliated Barzani completely failed to display.