[Rhodes22-list] The Obama Iraq Documentary

[Brad Haslett]

Bill,

Interesting article in yesterday's WSJ on Biden and Iraq (you know,
Joe Biden, designated gas bag of the 2nd smallest state with 150,000
more people than Alaska).

Brad

--------------------

Biden Wanted to Break Up Iraq
By DAN SENOR
August 29, 2008; Page A17

At the Democratic convention, Joe Biden had the opportunity to
showcase his foreign policy experience. Yet his principal and most
recent foreign policy initiative -- his plan for the soft partition of
Iraq -- was glaringly absent from his acceptance speech. When Barack
Obama named his running mate, he ticked off Mr. Biden's work on a
range of other foreign policy issues -- from chemical weapons to
Bosnia. But there was no mention of Mr. Biden's plan for Iraq.

This was a remarkable omission. Mr. Biden's Iraq plan had been a
central theme of his own presidential campaign, and the subject of
numerous addresses, television appearances, and op-eds. He authored a
Senate resolution, passed in September, that reflected his plan, and
he even created a Web site to promote it: www.planforiraq.com. But
there is no more talk about that Senate resolution. And the Web site
has been quietly taken down.

When Mr. Biden first proposed his plan with much fanfare just over two
years ago, it was greeted with deep concern by a number of Iraqi
political leaders. They loosely understood the Biden plan to mean a
Kurdish state in the provinces north from Mosul up to the Turkish and
Iranian borders; a Shiite state in the provinces south of Baghdad down
to the Kuwaiti border; and a Sunni state in the provinces immediately
north and northwest of Baghdad.

Mr. Biden was well known to Iraqi leaders. He had visited Iraq more
than other Senate critics of the Bush administration. As a supporter
of the war and later as a pivotal voice on the early congressional
funding debates, he had been constructive in his criticisms. For those
of us advocating for increased troop levels early on, Mr. Biden was an
ally. Indeed, even before the war, he said on the Senate floor that
"we must be clear with the American people that we are committing to
Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after."
And despite his reputation for lecturing, he actually would listen to
U.S. officials on the ground.

His case for soft partition was based on the Bosnian model where, he
argued, the U.S.-brokered Dayton accords had "kept the country whole
by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations." There was a
logic to it. Unlike post-World War II Germany and Japan, both Bosnia
and Iraq had disparate ethnic and sectarian communities; both were
modern creations, established out of the ashes of the Austrian and
Ottoman Empires, respectively.

But that is where the similarities ended. As a model for a tripartite
federation of secure, semi-independent regions, Bosnia offered few
actionable lessons for us in Iraq.

First, the 1995 Bosnia peace agreement was possible only after the
momentum in the Balkan war had turned markedly against the Serbs.
Until then, the Serbs had been on offense, were successful, and had no
incentive to compromise. But by the mid-'90s, the Serbs suddenly found
themselves defeated, with no viable alternatives to cutting a deal.

When Mr. Biden was arguing for a similar plan for Iraq, however, the
Sunni extremists -- al Qaeda in Iraq, the 1920s Revolutionary
Brigades, and other members of the Sunni resistance -- were in
ascendance. So were the Shiite extremists, including Moqtada al-Sadr's
Mahdi Army and the Islamist Badr Brigades. The radicals had not been
defeated.

Second, the key leaders behind the Bosnian war were in a position to
sign a deal and deliver their proxies. Who would Mr. Biden have
proposed we bring to the table to negotiate on behalf of the Sunnis
and Shiites? Did he have confidence that they would be able to rein in
the militias? The Shiite political leadership in Iraq's Parliament,
for example, had very little influence over the Sadrists, whose
movement was growing and whose leader had national -- not regional --
ambitions. Meanwhile, moderate Sunni leaders were losing hearts and
minds in Sunni dominated areas to a violent campaign of intimidation
by jihadists.

Third, the Bosnian leaders knew that the U.S. and its NATO allies were
committed to enforce any settlement with a long-term military
presence. NATO had dedicated some 100,000 troops to Bosnia and Kosovo.
As senior Clinton administration diplomat James Dobbins has pointed
out, in Bosnia the ratio of civilians to occupation military forces
was 50 to 1. Around the time that Mr. Biden was pushing his partition
proposal, the approximate civilian-to-military ratio in Baghdad alone
was 700 to 1. Our presence was virtually invisible. And, even worse,
Mr. Biden's proposal would have begun a phased redeployment of U.S.
troops in 2006 and withdrawn most of them by the end of 2007. He
argued that his plan would require fewer troops in the immediate
future, whereas Bosnia demonstrated just the opposite.

Fourth, by the time the Bosnian leaders had met at Dayton, the former
Yugoslav republic had already been carved into ethnic enclaves through
years of civil war. The contours for partition were a reality on the
ground. They just needed to be finalized at Dayton. In Iraq, while
some two million Iraqis had fled at the time of Mr. Biden's proposal
and another two million were internally displaced, millions more would
have been uprooted and forced to relocate. Almost a quarter of the
remaining population, some five million Iraqis, still lived in mixed
neighborhoods. As the International Crisis Group's Joost Hiltermann (a
critic of American policy in Iraq) explained at the time, "the
geographic boundaries do not run toward partition at all. There is no
Sunnistan or Shiastan. Nor can you create them given the highly
commingled conditions in Iraq, where people remain totally intermixed,
especially in the major cities."

Fifth, the regional neighbors in the Balkans ultimately supported the
Dayton accords. But a Bosnian solution in Iraq could have easily
invited hostilities from Turkey or Iran, both of which have their own
Kurdish minorities. If a semi-independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq
were to embolden other Kurdish communities nearby or serve as a harbor
for their operations, it could quickly destabilize borders.

At the time he was promoting his plan, Mr. Biden would rhetorically
challenge any critic to come up with their own plan if they didn't
like his. He would repeat his formula as though there were no other
path. His frustration was understandable -- by the end of 2006, we
were on the verge of complete failure, as sectarian violence had
surpassed al Qaeda and the insurgency as the principal threat to Iraq.
But his analysis was incorrect.

In 2007, the U.S. military showed that there was another option. The
Bush administration finally decided upon a comprehensive
counterinsurgency strategy, based on providing basic security for
Iraqi civilians, and backed by a surge of troops to support it. The
new strategy has paid large dividends against al Qaeda, Sunni
insurgents and Shiite militias. Iraqi deaths due to ethnosectarian
violence have declined by approximately 80% over the past year. U.S.
casualties are at record lows.

While there's still work to be done, reconciliation can be seen today
across Iraqi society. In the Iraqi Army, for example, the First
Brigade of the First Division is 60% Sunni, 40% Shiite. This mixed
brigade has fought in Anbar province against Sunni al-Qaeda
terrorists, as well as in operations in Basra against the Shiite
Sadrist militia. The sectarian mix, cohesion and effectiveness of the
First Division's First Brigade is increasingly reflected throughout
Iraq's national army. Mr. Biden has never explained whether the
relevance of his plan has been eclipsed by these nonsectarian trends.

In response to critics who charge that he lacks experience, Mr. Obama
has argued that he has something more important: judgment. What was
Mr. Obama's judgment about his running mate's plan for Iraq? How would
he have gone about implementing it if the two men were in charge at
the time? And if they now believe that Mr. Biden's signature plan was
a mistake, should they acknowledge that in a more serious way than by
simple omission?

Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and a founder of Rosemont Capital. He served as a senior
adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and
2004.

On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 5:57 PM, Bill Effros <bill at effros.com> wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHEIi4XKRmM
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