Iraq Math: From One, Make Three, Biden's Iraq plan gaining fans
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Iraq Math: From One, Make Three, Biden's
Iraq plan gaining fans
29.7.2007
July
29, 2007
Is Joe Biden auditioning to be the next secretary of
state?
For the record, he says no. Actually, he said,
“Hell, no,” during an interview last week. But the
thought isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem, even
though his poll numbers remain in the cellar among
the Democratic presidential hopefuls.
What he does have, that the other Democratic
candidates don’t, is a coherent proposal for dealing
with the debacle in Iraq that is increasingly
picking up steam. Foreign policy analysts, Capitol
Hill politicians and even officials in the Bush
administration have started sounding positive notes.
“The truth is, we could end up close to the Biden-Gelb
proposal,” a senior administration official said,
referring to the partition plan that Mr. Biden,
along with Leslie Gelb, the former president of the
Council on Foreign Relations, presented more than a
year ago in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times.
“Are we there yet?” the official added. “No.”
But not “Hell, no.”
Mr. Biden’s so-called soft-partition plan — a
variation of the blueprint dividing up Bosnia in
1995 — calls for dividing Iraq into three
semi-autonomous regions, held together by a central
government. There would be a loose Kurdistan, a
loose Shiastan and a loose Sunnistan, all under a
big, if weak, Iraq umbrella.
“The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united
Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each
ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite
Arab — room to run its own affairs, while leaving
the central government in charge of common
interests,” Mr. Biden and Mr. Gelb wrote in their
Op-Ed on May 1, 2006. “We could drive this in place
with irresistible sweeteners for the Sunnis to join
in, a plan designed by the military for withdrawing
and redeploying American forces, and a regional
nonaggression pact.”
Delaware senator and US presidential candidate Joe
Biden
Flash Video
The proposal acknowledges forthrightly what a
growing number of Middle East experts say is plain
as day: Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis are not moving
toward reconciliation; they still haven’t managed to
get an oil law passed, and de facto ethnic cleansing
is under way as Sunnis flee largely Shiite
neighborhoods and towns, and vice versa.
The plan was dumped on when it came out last year.
“Partitioning Iraq: No Starter” was the headline on
a column by George Hishmeh in Gulf News, a daily
newspaper that specializes in the Middle East. Mr.
Hishmeh, a former writer for the United States
Information Agency, pointed out a common complaint
about the partition idea, that the very word
“partition” has a bad ring to Arab ears given that a
United Nations partition plan paved the way for the
creation of the State of Israel.
Foreign policy analysts also pointed out that
breaking up Iraq could cause bloodletting (as if
that isn’t happening now) in Iraq’s urban areas.
While Sunnis predominate in the western part of the
country, Kurds in the north, and Shiites in the
south, Iraq’s cities are not as homogeneous.
Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul don’t have clear
geographical lines separating the main groups.
Or at least they didn’t. The reality is, Iraq’s
cities have become far more homogeneous recently as
terrified residents have fled areas where their
ethnic group doesn’t predominate. The neighborhoods
around the edges of Baghdad have already experienced
a lot of ethnic cleansing.
Officially, Bush administration officials maintain
that they share President Bush’s hopes that
increased American troop strength in Baghdad will
tamp down the violence and create political space
for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds to reach a political
solution. But testimony and interviews this month
about conditions in Iraq indicated that the
administration is already making de facto moves
towards partition.
The State Department, in particular, has stressed a
proposal to build up provincial reconstruction teams
out in the Iraqi provinces, with the goal of
strengthening local tribal leaders. That, in itself,
points toward greater decentralization in Iraq.
By way of caution, experts say a successful
partition of Iraq would hardly be easy, involving
careful consultation with Iraq’s neighbors,
including the feuding regional behemoths Iran and
Saudi Arabia, not to mention tiptoeing around
Turkey’s nationalist sensibilities on the Kurdish
question. Mr. Biden, who said he believed that one
way or the other, the United States would find
itself in the role of trying to mediate a soft
partition, recently went up to the United Nations in
New York to chat about his idea with officials from
the permanent members of the Security Council, and
to try to enlist the help of the United Nations. He
said he got a good response.
“One said to me, ‘What took you guys so long?’ ”Mr.
Biden said. “We’re going to get there either by our
action or by our inaction; what we need to do is to
manage this transition.”
Hmmm. Coming up with a proposal on American foreign
policy? Going up to the United Nations to try to
sell it? Trying to get America’s allies on board? If
this president thing doesn’t work out, that wouldn’t
be bad experience for someone who did want to become
secretary of state.
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