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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) 598-867