Was Vice President Biden Right About Iraq?

Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki (L) walks beside U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (C) as Biden arrives at the press centre of the Council of Ministers in Baghdad January 23, 2010. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh is at right. Credit: Reuters/Iraqi Government/Handout

Joe Biden Was Right About Dividing Iraq -- James Kitfield , Defense One

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.

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My Comment: James Kitfield is right on this one. When I first heard of then Senator Biden's proposal of a divided Iraq I greeted it with skepticism and doubt. With hindsight .... putting in place a federated style of government for Iraq was probably the right thing to because the present style of government and system is clearly not working.