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Joe Biden May Have Been Right About Iraq | Observer
Not sure if you saw this earlier this week with everything going on but
found it interesting.

http://observer.com/2015/06/joe-biden-may-have-been-right-about-iraq/

Joe Biden May Have Been Right About Iraq
[image: US Vice President Joe Biden gives two thumbs-up prior to US
President Barack Obama delivering the State of the Union address before a
joint session of Congress on January 28, 2014 at the US Capitol in
Washington. AFP PHOTO/Saul LOEB (Photo credit should read SAUL
LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)]<img
src="https://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gettyimages-465757477-1.jpg"
/>
<https://nyoobserver.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gettyimages-465757477-1.jpg>

US Vice President Joe Biden gives two thumbs-up prior to US President
Barack Obama delivering the State of the Union address before a joint
session of Congress on January 28, 2014 at the US Capitol in Washington.
(Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images).

Vice president Joe Biden was in our thoughts this week. First, because of
the death of his son, Beau, at age 46 from brain cancer. We extend our
sincere condolences.

Second, we were reminded of an Op-Ed
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/opinion/01biden.html> written in 2006 by
then-senator Biden along with Leslie Gelb, the former president of the
Council on Foreign Relations. In that article, Messrs. Biden and Gelb said
President Bush did not “have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he
hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor.” The
two then proposed breaking Iraq into three “largely autonomous regions –
Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite – “with a viable central government in Baghdad.”
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It must pain President Obama to recognize that Mr. Biden’s words are as apt
a description today as they were when being used to criticize President
Bush.
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It must pain President Obama to recognize that Mr. Biden’s words are as apt
a description today as they were when being used to criticize President
Bush. But let’s put politics and partisanship aside and try to address a
very real problem: what do we do about Iraq?

We are not enamored with – nor should we be constrained in our thinking by
– either Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule (“You break it, you own it,”) or
Rand Paul’s naive isolationism. Rather, we think twenty-first century
realpolitik is in order: ISIS presents a real threat to those they consider
non-believers and further destabilizes an already unstable region; and
power-sharing among Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds simply has not worked.
Neither the billions of dollars we poured into post-invasion Iraq nor the
training we provided its army was sufficient to motivate Iraqi troops to
defend Ramadi.

Iraq was a post-World War I creation by Britain, which had defeated the
Turks and occupied Baghdad. When the British mandate ended in 1932, a Sunni
dominated monarchy was created. Both the Shiites and the Kurds fought for
independence, and very little has improved since. The European idea of Iraq
as a nation was intrinsically flawed since it ignored the elemental
religious cleavages that have endured and strengthened over the past
century. It is time to give the three-state solution the consideration it
deserves.

The use of that phrase – three-state, rather than autonomous regions – is
both considered and fraught with dangers. There is no question that Turkey
would not be happy with a Kurdish state on its border and the allocation of
oil wealth would undoubtedly be problematic. But it appears that a viable
central government in Baghdad seems to be little more than an illusion, the
triumph of hope over experience.

Long ago and far away, Mr. Biden pointed to Bosnia and the Dayton Accords
as a possible model for Iraq. We are coming up on the twentieth anniversary
of a solution that managed to keep Muslims, Croats and Serbs from killing
each other. It is time to think clearly and speak candidly about a similar
approach in Iraq.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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