Turns Out, Joe Biden Was Right About Dividing Iraq

[glasshouses]

January 30, 2014 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



http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/turns-out-joe-biden-was-right-about-dividing-iraq-20140130

[Octafish]

1. Robert Gates, BFEE

Know your BFEE: Robert Gates did more than keep the doors open at BCCI

From October Surprise to BCCI to the Iraq war disaster, the guy's a stooge for the War Party.

That's why I was puzzled when President Obama kept the guy on in 2009.

[TwilightGardener]

2. Gates turned out to be less of a wise old statesman, more of a classless asshole--

and to attack Biden for having been wrong (arguable) takes some hubris, because I believe Gates was pretty famously wrong about Russia at least a couple times.

[malaise]

3. This should be obvious

but Iraq was not and is not Biden's or anyone else's to divide

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. "Iraq" is a fiction cobbled together by colonial powers nearly a century ago.

It's always taken ruthless strongmen to hold it together.

Maybe this is the end.

[Nye Bevan]

5. Well.... dividing Ireland turned out to be not such a great idea.

Maybe it would have worked better than what we have now, maybe not. It's hard to tell.