Biden Wanted to Break Up Iraq

By DAN SENOR
August 29, 2008; Page A17

At the Democratic convention, Joe Biden had the opportunity to showcase his foreign policy experience. Yet his principal and most recent foreign policy initiative -- his plan for the soft partition of Iraq -- was glaringly absent from his acceptance speech. When Barack Obama named his running mate, he ticked off Mr. Biden's work on a range of other foreign policy issues -- from chemical weapons to Bosnia. But there was no mention of Mr. Biden's plan for Iraq.

This was a remarkable omission. Mr. Biden's Iraq plan had been a central theme of his own presidential campaign, and the subject of numerous addresses, television appearances, and op-eds. He authored a Senate resolution, passed in September, that reflected his plan, and he even created a Web site to promote it: www.planforiraq.com. But there is no more talk about that Senate resolution. And the Web site has been quietly taken down.

Why the sudden silence?

When Mr. Biden first proposed his plan with much fanfare just over two years ago, it was greeted with deep concern by a number of Iraqi political leaders. They loosely understood the Biden plan to mean a Kurdish state in the provinces north from Mosul up to the Turkish and Iranian borders; a Shiite state in the provinces south of Baghdad down to the Kuwaiti border; and a Sunni state in the provinces immediately north and northwest of Baghdad.

Mr. Biden was well known to Iraqi leaders. He had visited Iraq more than other Senate critics of the Bush administration. As a supporter of the war and later as a pivotal voice on the early congressional funding debates, he had been constructive in his criticisms. For those of us advocating for increased troop levels early on, Mr. Biden was an ally. Indeed, even before the war, he said on the Senate floor that "we must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after." And despite his reputation for lecturing, he actually would listen to U.S. officials on the ground.

His case for soft partition was based on the Bosnian model where, he argued, the U.S.-brokered Dayton accords had "kept the country whole by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations." There was a logic to it. Unlike post-World War II Germany and Japan, both Bosnia and Iraq had disparate ethnic and sectarian communities; both were modern creations, established out of the ashes of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, respectively.

But that is where the similarities ended. As a model for a tripartite federation of secure, semi-independent regions, Bosnia offered few actionable lessons for us in Iraq.

First, the 1995 Bosnia peace agreement was possible only after the momentum in the Balkan war had turned markedly against the Serbs. Until then, the Serbs had been on offense, were successful, and had no incentive to compromise. But by the mid-'90s, the Serbs suddenly found themselves defeated, with no viable alternatives to cutting a deal.

When Mr. Biden was arguing for a similar plan for Iraq, however, the Sunni extremists -- al Qaeda in Iraq, the 1920s Revolutionary Brigades, and other members of the Sunni resistance -- were in ascendance. So were the Shiite extremists, including Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Islamist Badr Brigades. The radicals had not been defeated.

Second, the key leaders behind the Bosnian war were in a position to sign a deal and deliver their proxies. Who would Mr. Biden have proposed we bring to the table to negotiate on behalf of the Sunnis and Shiites? Did he have confidence that they would be able to rein in the militias? The Shiite political leadership in Iraq's Parliament, for example, had very little influence over the Sadrists, whose movement was growing and whose leader had national -- not regional -- ambitions. Meanwhile, moderate Sunni leaders were losing hearts and minds in Sunni dominated areas to a violent campaign of intimidation by jihadists.

Third, the Bosnian leaders knew that the U.S. and its NATO allies were committed to enforce any settlement with a long-term military presence. NATO had dedicated some 100,000 troops to Bosnia and Kosovo. As senior Clinton administration diplomat James Dobbins has pointed out, in Bosnia the ratio of civilians to occupation military forces was 50 to 1. Around the time that Mr. Biden was pushing his partition proposal, the approximate civilian-to-military ratio in Baghdad alone was 700 to 1. Our presence was virtually invisible. And, even worse, Mr. Biden's proposal would have begun a phased redeployment of U.S. troops in 2006 and withdrawn most of them by the end of 2007. He argued that his plan would require fewer troops in the immediate future, whereas Bosnia demonstrated just the opposite.

Fourth, by the time the Bosnian leaders had met at Dayton, the former Yugoslav republic had already been carved into ethnic enclaves through years of civil war. The contours for partition were a reality on the ground. They just needed to be finalized at Dayton. In Iraq, while some two million Iraqis had fled at the time of Mr. Biden's proposal and another two million were internally displaced, millions more would have been uprooted and forced to relocate. Almost a quarter of the remaining population, some five million Iraqis, still lived in mixed neighborhoods. As the International Crisis Group's Joost Hiltermann (a critic of American policy in Iraq) explained at the time, "the geographic boundaries do not run toward partition at all. There is no Sunnistan or Shiastan. Nor can you create them given the highly commingled conditions in Iraq, where people remain totally intermixed, especially in the major cities."

Fifth, the regional neighbors in the Balkans ultimately supported the Dayton accords. But a Bosnian solution in Iraq could have easily invited hostilities from Turkey or Iran, both of which have their own Kurdish minorities. If a semi-independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq were to embolden other Kurdish communities nearby or serve as a harbor for their operations, it could quickly destabilize borders.

At the time he was promoting his plan, Mr. Biden would rhetorically challenge any critic to come up with their own plan if they didn't like his. He would repeat his formula as though there were no other path. His frustration was understandable -- by the end of 2006, we were on the verge of complete failure, as sectarian violence had surpassed al Qaeda and the insurgency as the principal threat to Iraq. But his analysis was incorrect.

In 2007, the U.S. military showed that there was another option. The Bush administration finally decided upon a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, based on providing basic security for Iraqi civilians, and backed by a surge of troops to support it. The new strategy has paid large dividends against al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. Iraqi deaths due to ethnosectarian violence have declined by approximately 80% over the past year. U.S. casualties are at record lows.

While there's still work to be done, reconciliation can be seen today across Iraqi society. In the Iraqi Army, for example, the First Brigade of the First Division is 60% Sunni, 40% Shiite. This mixed brigade has fought in Anbar province against Sunni al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as in operations in Basra against the Shiite Sadrist militia. The sectarian mix, cohesion and effectiveness of the First Division's First Brigade is increasingly reflected throughout Iraq's national army. Mr. Biden has never explained whether the relevance of his plan has been eclipsed by these nonsectarian trends.

In response to critics who charge that he lacks experience, Mr. Obama has argued that he has something more important: judgment. What was Mr. Obama's judgment about his running mate's plan for Iraq? How would he have gone about implementing it if the two men were in charge at the time? And if they now believe that Mr. Biden's signature plan was a mistake, should they acknowledge that in a more serious way than by simple omission?

Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a founder of Rosemont Capital. He served as a senior adviser to the Coalition in Iraq and was based in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004.