Boston Globe: Iraq Moving Toward Biden's Controversial Vision

[Hissyspit]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/09/21/iraq_moving_toward_bidens_controversial_vision

Iraq moving toward Biden's controversial vision
Power being decentralized on its own

By Bryan Bender
Globe Staff / September 21, 2008

WASHINGTON - In May 2006, at the height of the violence in Iraq, Senator Joe Biden floated a controversial proposal: carve out autonomous regions for the three main ethnic and religious groups - Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Arab Shi'ites - and give them control of most governmental functions except for the military and oil industry, which would remain under central authority.

Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, eventually pushed through a congressional resolution backing such a federal system in Iraq, but the plan was resisted by most Iraqi leaders and many Middle East specialists who said it would break up the country and fuel more violence.

Two and a half years later, as Biden runs for vice president, his prescription remains a key component of his claim to foreign policy expertise - and a talking point for Republicans who question his judgment. Senator John McCain's presidential campaign insists that Biden "has been soundly proven wrong by the surge strategy" championed last year by the GOP candidate.

Biden, however, still insists that his approach is the right one and has convinced his running mate, Senator Barack Obama, of its merits. "Both senators Obama and Biden continue to believe that federalism is a good solution if that's what the Iraqis decide," said Wendy Morigi, an Obama spokesman.

While there remain many detractors who insist that Biden's proposal is unworkable, a growing number of them assert that a rough approximation of what Biden envisioned - a decentralization of power - appears to be taking shape anyway. "He was trying to find sensible solutions during a time when his colleagues were just calling for timetables to get out," said John Hamre, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. The plan was "a recognition that a 'soft partition' was inevitable and therefore we should anticipate it."

- snip -

Baghdad is now mostly Shi'ite after sectarian warfare forced Sunnis to flee. Kurdish forces in the north have consolidated their territorial claims. Across the country, all 18 provinces - many of which are dominated by a single ethnic group - are holding their first elections later this year, thereby preparing to assume more power.

Biden put forward his proposal during a period of record violence among Iraq's ethnic and religious factions. In an op-ed in The New York Times titled "Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq," he and his longtime confidant Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations proposed that the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shi'ite regions "be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration, and security."

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[BrklynLiberal]

1. He saw the inevitablity of this outcome, and was willing to say it...before anyone else was.

[and-justice-for-all]

2. Biden was right..

and the gop, dead wrong.