[Rhodes22-list] Political - Biden on Iraq

[Robert Skinner]

Brad - my $0.02:

In the long term, with or without US involvement,
I think Iraq will tear itself apart.  The
constant internal feuds, combined with outside
disruptive forces from Iran, Al-Qaeda, etc.
would move the country strongly in that direction.

Sadam held Iraq together in much the way that
Stalin held Russia together (and Putin tries to
do today) - force and fear.  Absent such a
dictator, the feudal character of Iraq's history
and its current decentralizing tendencies are
sufficient to prevent a benevolent democracy and
respected central government from functioning
for any length of time - say, 15 years.

IMHO, Biden was ahead of his time.  Hope I'm
wrong.  Too many good guys bet and lost it all
on the current strategies.

/Robert
----------------------------------------------
Brad Haslett wrote:
> 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.