Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq getting more attention.
What [Biden] does have, that the other Democratic candidates don\ufffdt, 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.
\ufffdThe truth is, we could end up close to the Biden-Gelb proposal,\ufffd 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.
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Mr. Biden\ufffds so-called soft-partition plan \ufffd a variation of the blueprint dividing up Bosnia in 1995 \ufffd 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.
\ufffdThe idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group \ufffd Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab \ufffd room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests,\ufffd Mr. Biden and Mr. Gelb wrote in their Op-Ed on May 1, 2006. \ufffdWe 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.\ufffd
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\ufffdt 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.
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The [link|http://www.planforiraq.com/plan|plan] does make a lot of sense, but like anything in international affairs - the devil's in the details. Like it's hard to believe that the Sunni groups would sign-up for it (they want a unified Iraq, with the hope that they'll be able to rule again in the indefinite future), and the Shia groups still seem to figure that they don't need to compromise - they just need to wait out the Americans to win and impose any conditions they want on the smaller groups. The Kurds want to go their own way ASAP, trying to take Kirkuk with them. So even if Biden's plan makes a lot of sense, there may be far too much water over the dam for it to be implemented now.
It's hard to see Bush signing on to it either, IMO.
Cheers,
Scott.