Biden has a new proposal out.
The senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed Monday that Iraq be divided into three separate regions -- Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni -- with a central government in Baghdad.
In an op-ed essay in Monday's edition of The New York Times, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record). D-Del., wrote that the idea "is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group ... room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests."
Now I think that splitting up Iraq is a good idea. But that's the issue. It isn't up to me or Biden. This is really something the IRAQIs should decide about their own country and not some foreign WASPy politicians thousands of miles away. You know its that democracy thing the beltway folks are always yammering on about.
He suggests creating 3 states with a centralized government. Isn't the problem now that they can't get a centralized government up and running? Doesn't that just put us back at square one? If you are going to split them up, you might as well give them full autonomy. But as I said, it really isn't our decision in the first place.
He goes on to say:
President Bush "must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing and redeploying our troops from Iraq by 2008 (while providing for a small but effective residual force to combat terrorists and keep the neighbors honest)."
2008. Are you kidding me? We should be out by the end of the year. There are several other Democratic plans out there that have us withdrawing by 2007 at the latest. I think Joe needs to get on board the exit train. This residual force sounds pretty open ended. Combined with his past statements, I believe he would have us there until 2012. They were able to run the country before we arrived. They arent ignorant or uneducated. There are other countries in the world that have new regimes every few years, have an underpriviledged populace and few natural resources and they seem to manage ok. The longer we stay the worse the situation will get. Iraq's neighbors pose little threat unless you think the Kuwaitis are going to drive their 300SELs across the border and slap people around. Say Biden's plan was followed. We would then have to protect the Kurds from the Turks who would not be happy about an independent Kurdistan. We would still be targets in a Sunni/Shia civil war. I don't think the country could be split up without conflict and we end up policing state lines. And best of all we would still be targets for low-rent thugs who want to play at being terrorist.
With each passing month, Biden just seems more and more like Lieberman light.