So people are still flogging this as an alternative to the 2007 surge in Iraq?
Biden, then a senator, championed a more federal system explicitly allowed by the Iraqi constitution (at the insistence of the Kurds), devolving power from the central government in Baghdad to the provinces. Although Biden denied it at the time, his proposal would almost certainly have led to the de facto soft partition of Iraq into three autonomous regions dominated by Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. A similar approach in the 1990s patched together Bosnia out of the detritus of the Balkans civil war between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. In a 2007 op-ed, Biden warned, “If the United States can’t put this federalism idea on track, we will have no chance for a political settlement in Iraq and, without that, no chance for leaving Iraq without leaving chaos behind.”
He was ahead of his time.
“Biden got it dead right, and I still think transitioning to a federal power-sharing arrangement is the only way to stop the killing and hold Iraq together,” says Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote the op-ed with Biden.
I hate to bring up the obvious rebuttal. But when we conducted the surge offensive, we did stop the killing and hold Iraq together. Iraq was a single state and fairly quiet by the end of 2011:
U.S. military personnel, diplomats and intelligence officers joined with Iraqi forces and militia to defeat al Qaeda by the end of 2008. A unity government of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds was in power in Baghdad. Low levels of al Qaeda attacks continued, but they posed little threat to Iraq's stability.
Dividing Iraq in 2007 would have been an admission of defeat in the war. Which is probably the point of raising the division of Iraq again.
Is the rock-pounding stupidity of the Obama administration in leaving "Bush's war" at the end of 2011 and refusing to openly stand with Iraq since then to be ignored as the major reason for Iraq's recent difficulties?
Years before we defeated the battlefield enemies, I was emphasizing what Strategypage called the post-war fight for rule of law that had to follow military victory. Staying in Iraq in force after 2011 was key to helping the new structure of Iraq withstand internal divisions and Iranian pressure.
I was opposed to a war-time division of Iraq. Start a soft partition and the parts might make it hard.
In peacetime, if the Iraqis want to divide up, I say go for it. Nobody laments the passing of Czechoslovakia as a political entity. So when fighting passions fade, the topic is certainly reasonable.
But in 2007, before the Sunni Arabs were defeated, even a soft partition of Iraq would have given angry Sunni Arabs a base in western and central Iraq.
We needed a unified Iraq to defeat the Sunni Arabs and the Iranian backed hand puppets of Sadr's militias and death squads. A unified Iraq gave Sunni Arabs a place to go in order to turn on al Qaeda. A unified Iraq kept the good Kurdish units in the fight against al Qaeda and prevented the Turks from getting trigger-happy. A unified Iraq diluted Iran's influence by keeping a lot of Kurds and Sunni Arabs to join with anti-Iranian Shias to resist what would be more Iranian pressure on a Shia state based in the south.
And another point to raise is just how would dividing up Iraq end the fighting between the three major groups of Kurds, Shias, and Sunni Arabs?
Add to the ongoing struggle between the Kurds and the rest of Iraq over where the borders of the Kurdish region lie the questions of where to draw the borders between the Sunni Arab areas in the center and far west and the Shias in the south and center.
Face it, even a "soft" partition of Iraq would have involved us in sanctioning and organizing ethnic cleansing on top of the wartime death and destruction.
Iraq, right now, could make division of oil revenue more regularized without starting down a path of soft partition. That would ease Sunni Arab concersn, a lot, I imagine. This would avoid the questions of where regional borders should be set.
After the Sunni Arabs reawaken to redefeat al Qaeda and after the Iraqi military is stronger and able to offers a credible fight against Iranian threats, which would make the Iraqi government more confident of resisting Iran, then we can talk soft or hard partion, if you want.
People are still too eager to write off Iraq. We haven't lost this struggle. We've screwed this up the last two years, but we still built a lot in Iraq to enable us to recover and make this period of al Qaeda resurgence an unfortunate hiccup on the way to a better Iraq and hopefully a better region.
