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On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Alexander S. Mackler
<smacklera@gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/turns-out-joe-biden-was-right-about-dividing-iraq-20140130
> Magazine <http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine> Turns Out, Joe Biden Was
> Right About Dividing Iraq The former senator took a lot of grief for saying
> the country should be partitioned. He's going to have the last laugh.
> Broken: Iraq may be beyond repair.(AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images)
> [image: James Kitfield] <http://www.nationaljournal.com/reporters/bio/50>
> By James Kitfield
> January 30, 2014
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> In his new book *Duty: Memoir of a Secretary at War,* Robert Gates
> memorably impugns Joe Biden's judgment as "wrong on nearly every major
> foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."
> Central to his argument is Biden's opposition to the "troop surge" that
> President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Gates launched in 2007 to bolster
> a shaky government in Baghdad and save Iraq from a sectarian civil war.
> 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.
> Indeed, Iraq today is in danger of slipping back into civil war. From the
> moment the last U.S. troops left in late 2011, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
> al-Maliki and his Shiite-led government set about ruthlessly consolidating
> power. They ordered the arrest of political opponents, including the Sunni
> vice president, who was charged with murder and fled the country. The Sunni
> tribal sheikhs behind the "Anbar Awakening"--whose decision to turn against
> the Sunnis of al-Qaida in Iraq and fight alongside U.S. forces was critical
> to pulling Iraq back from the abyss--have been systematically marginalized.
> Promises of government salaries and the incorporation of their militias
> into the Iraqi security forces were never fully honored. Last year, the
> military launched a bloody crackdown on mostly peaceful Sunni
> demonstrations, killing 38 protesters and sparking a popular revolt.
> Bolstered by the violence next door in Syria and a growing Sunni
> disaffection in Iraq, al-Qaida has predictably come storming back into
> Anbar, recapturing the strategic city of Fallujah. Al-Qaida's strategy of
> slaughtering Shiite civilians to spark a civil war is largely behind a 2013
> wave of violence that killed nearly 8,000 Iraqis and wounded an estimated
> 25,000--representing the worst violence since the U.S. troop surge. "There
> is a revolt in the desert led by a younger generation of Sunni tribal
> leaders, who are pissed off and reject the older generation's failed
> outreach to Maliki and the central government," says Robert Baer, a former
> CIA case officer in the Middle East who remains in frequent touch with
> Iraq's Sunni tribes. "Iraq is breaking apart before our eyes along the
> natural sectarian borders of Kurdistan, Sunni-stan, and Shiite-stan, and
> that drift apart looks increasingly inevitable."
> The way to stop the violence may be separation. "Iraq is at a crossroads,
> and I do think federalism could solve many of the problems we face," said
> Osama al-Nujayfi, the Sunni speaker of Iraq's Council of Representatives,
> speaking last week at the Brookings Institution. The Kurdish region in the
> north is already largely autonomous and peaceful, and at least two other
> provinces (including the strategically important and oil-rich Shiite region
> around Basra in the south) have begun the constitutional process for
> gaining regional autonomy. To date, their requests to the electoral
> commission in Baghdad to hold local referendums on autonomy, he said, have
> been ignored by the federal government and fiercely opposed by Maliki. "The
> government has a double standard, supporting some favored groups and
> oppressing others, and they are demanding their rights under the federal
> system spelled out in the constitution," Nujayfi said. "If the government
> does not respect the constitution and the rule of law, then citizens will
> find alternatives. That is very dangerous, because some provincial
> governors are already talking about rebellion." (Stephanie Stamm)
> Perhaps if the Obama administration had not precipitously withdrawn U.S.
> troops in 2011, after failing to reach a Status of Forces Agreement with
> Baghdad, Iraq might have completed a more orderly democratic transition
> with functional governing institutions and separation of powers. (Although
> it's possible that Maliki saw U.S. troops as impediments to his
> consolidation of power and that no agreement would have been acceptable to
> him.) What's increasingly clear is that Iraq failed to make the transition
> to a democratic political system and culture, and, without a strong center,
> the sectarian forces are once again pulling it apart.
> A Maliki victory in the April elections, increased Kurdish agitation for
> outright independence, or continued territorial gains by al-Qaida all
> threaten to accelerate that devolution. "Maliki gets the lion's share of
> the blame, because his paranoia and brutish power grab have terrified the
> rest of the country," says Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow at the
> Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy and a former
> CIA Middle East analyst. "But what's done is done, and at this point it's
> hard to see how you put Humpty Dumpty back together again out of Iraq's
> Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish parts. To make Iraq work probably requires a
> shift of power from the center to the periphery."
> Which is what Biden was saying all along.
> This article appears in the February 1, 2014, edition of National Journal
> Magazine <http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/latest-issue-20140201>
> as Biden
> Was Right.
> --
> Alexander Snyder Mackler
> (302) 598-86