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Report: Biden supports three-part Iraq
split
4.3.2007
By CRIS BARRISH |
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Plan maintains limited central government
March 4, 2007
Les Gelb had eased into his seat on a jet from New
York to Washington late in 2005 when U.S. Sen. Joe
Biden unexpectedly plopped down next to him.
Biden, then gearing up for a presidential run, was
just the man Gelb -- a veteran journalist and
diplomat -- needed to see.
For more than two years, Gelb had been pushing a
plan that would split Iraq into three self-governing
regions -- Kurd, Shiite and Sunni -- with a limited
central government in Baghdad overseeing border
defense, oil revenues and matters such as health.
Despite publishing pieces in major newspapers and
delivering numerous speeches, Gelb's plan had
languished. "I was pitching it all over the place,
making no converts among foreign policy people,"
Gelb said. "Running into Biden was like a dream."
Their plane got delayed on the runway, so the two
foreign policy wonks spent three hours hashing over
the idea. By the time they landed in D.C., the two
had agreed to join forces. |
Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, is the ranking member of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Leslie H. Gelb is the
president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Gov website
Photo: AFP |
Today, as Biden's quest
for the White House has begun in earnest, the road
map he and Gelb unveiled nine months ago is being
hailed by many academics and foreign affairs
authorities as the best hope for Iraq, where
sectarian warfare is raging, thousands of residents
are fleeing and suicide bombers launch almost daily
attacks.
With recent polls showing most Americans believe
invading Iraq was a mistake and President Bush's
recent decision to send more troops into battle
zones is a bad one, candidates' positions on the
conflict could play a deciding role in the 2008
presidential campaign. In a nationwide CBS poll last
month, 87 percent called a candidate's stance on
Iraq the most important or an important issue.
Supporters of the Biden-Gelb plan include Richard
Holbrooke, architect of the 1995 peace accords in
the former Yugoslavia and later U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations. Last month, during hearings
chaired by Biden, former U.S. secretaries of state
Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright had kind
words.
"I'm sympathetic to an outcome that permits large
regional autonomy," Kissinger told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
Not everybody is enamored.
Nearly four years after invading Iraq, Bush's focus
is on Operation Jumpstart -- sending 21,500 more
troops into Iraq.
Phoebe Marr, author of "The Modern History of Iraq,"
thinks the Biden-Gelb plan is too simplistic because
Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds have several internal
factions fighting for supremacy.
"The assumption that these groups are homogeneous is
erroneous," Marr said in a telephone interview from
her Florida home. "They are divided between parties,
generations, tribal groups and so on. The Sunni and
Shia are very fragmented. And wrapping religious and
these identity politics around regions as a strategy
is extremely dangerous."
Biden would like to hear critics' alternatives.
Meanwhile, he opposes Bush's troop surge and is
pressing for a resolution to repeal the 2002
resolution authorizing U.S. military force and limit
military options.
"It's better to have a unified national government.
But I don't think there's any possibility of that
happening," he said.
'Only way to go'
Biden and Gelb, president emeritus of the
nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, introduced
their five-point plan for Iraq in a May 2006 op-ed
piece in the New York Times.
"The sectarian genie is out of the bottle and no
number of American troops can put it back in," the
duo wrote. "Militias are the law in swaths of Iraq
and death squads kill dozens daily. ... The new
government of national unity will not stop this
dangerous deterioration."
Beyond the three regional governments, the key
proposal is to give Sunnis 20 percent of oil
revenues. Sunnis make up about 20 percent of Iraq's
27 million residents, yet the the west-central part
of Iraq, which Sunnis dominate, has no oil.
Shiites make up about 60 percent of Iraqis and
control the new government. Sunnis, who ran the
country under Saddam, are now on the outside,
spearheading the insurgency. The Kurds, who rule the
north, already have their own semiautonomous system.
Other facets of the plan:
•Provide more U.S. reconstruction aid, and insist
that other countries, especially oil-rich ones, do
the same.
•Convene a regional security conference in which
Iran and other neighbors pledge to respect Iraq's
borders.
•Withdraw most U.S. soldiers by the end of 2007,
keeping perhaps 20,000 to strike terrorists, monitor
borders and train security forces.
The White House criticized the idea immediately
after it was presented.
"We remain committed to a federal, democratic,
pluralist and unified Iraq in which there is full
respect for political and human rights," White House
spokesman Scott McClellan said then. "A partition
government with regional security forces and a weak
central government ... is something that no Iraqi
leader has proposed, and that the Iraqi people have
not supported."
Those who support the plan argue that it is not a
partition of one country into three.
"It's the only way to go, a political power-sharing
arrangement in a country which cannot have central
governance," Holbrooke said. "Either the country
splits apart, which is really dangerous, or it
shares power. This is really a visionary plan."
Qubad Talabani: The centralized government has
failed since its inception
Qubad Talabani, the Washington representative of the
Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, endorses the
concept, though he envisions more than three
regions. Talabani's father, Jalal, is Iraq's
president, a largely ceremonial post.
Biden pointed out that Iraq's constitution "allows
for the creation of federal regions." The document
was approved overwhelmingly in a vote of nearly 10
million citizens in 2005.
"Whether it's three regions or five regions or 15
regions, this is a technicality that will be left to
Iraqis on the ground," Talabani said. "What we need
is a system of governance such that a multi-ethnic,
sectarian society can live with one another. The
centralized government has failed since its
inception."
Sharing billions of dollars in oil revenues could
ease Sunni opposition, Talabani said.
"It's critical to this plan," he said. "We need
checks and balances in place to ensure all regions
will get their fair share."
Creating the regions -- perhaps even making Baghdad
its own region -- could hasten the peace process,
Talabani said.
"Baghdad is the prize. That's why everybody is
fighting for it," he said. "Regionalization will
lessen its significance."
'Fight isn't out of them'
Violence by religious and ethnic factions and
militias, criminal gangs and insurgents keeps
pushing peace to the back burner, though.
"Their plan is a wonderful template for an optimal
political settlement," said Anne-Marie Slaughter,
dean at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School
of Public and International Affairs. "But they don't
have a way and I'm not sure any of us have a way to
get the parties to the table to endorse that
settlement."
The warring factions -- with the U.S. troops in the
line of fire -- will likely continue fighting,
Slaughter said, "until one party gets a decisive
edge."
Slaughter recommended setting a withdrawal deadline
-- perhaps the end of 2008, as Democratic candidate
Barack Obama has suggested, to spur Iraqis to "end
this civil war."
Biden and Gelb see parallels in Iraq to Bosnia and
Herzegovina in the mid-1990s, where war-weary
factions decided to divide land along ethnic lines:
separate areas for Serbs and a Muslim-Croat
federation. A fragile peace still holds, more than a
decade later.
Slaughter said it appears Iraqi factions are not yet
ready to broach such a deal. "We have not found a
way," she said, "to get the parties to conclude they
have more to gain from talking. We could get them to
that point by saying we are withdrawing."
Holbrooke agreed the plan's prospects have
diminished since its introduction nine months ago:
"Every passing cycle gets more difficult."
'No magical solution'
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., ranking Republican on
the Foreign Relations Committee, said residents of
Iraq have the right to decide whether they want a
unified nation.
"I'm reticent to endorse," he said, "what clearly
would be three countries."
Another knock against the three-region plan is that
Baghdad, Kirkuk and other cities with diverse ethnic
and religious populations might never rally around a
single identity -- Shiite, Sunni or Kurd.
"That's the major obstacle," Gelb said. "That's
where the fighting is going on, in major cities that
are mixed."
Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat also
eyeing the presidency, said the Biden-Gelb plan
might ultimately be the path Iraqis choose. "It may
break down to that," said Dodd, who fears such a
division might lead Iraq's neighbors to attack one
or more regions and expand the fighting.
"There are no good solutions here, no magical
solution to this thing," Dodd said. "I don't think
it really exists."
Bruce Riedel, a Middle Eastern scholar at the
nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said the only
feasible solution for America is a total pullout.
The Biden-Gelb plan, Riedel said, is flawed because
the country "doesn't nicely fit into regions which
are ethnically homogeneous."
Nor are factions "ready to split the pie," he said.
"They all have designs to be bigger rather than
smaller."
Riedel thinks America should gradually withdraw
troops over the ensuing months and opt for "a robust
diplomatic approach."
The pullout, he contends, must be total. "If you are
going to have an exit strategy, the most important
part is to exit," Riedel said. "You shouldn't be
loitering in the door."
Biden, though, believes the plan he and Gelb forged
on a tarmac can lead to peace. "This is the only
chance," Biden said, "to leave without having traded
a dictatorship for chaos."
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