tdaxp

Joe Biden, a man running for President in 2008, has delighted this blogger by endorsing the tdaxp plan for victory in Iraq.

Iraq should be divided into three largely autonomous regions -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- with a weaker central government in Baghdad, Sen. Joseph Biden said on Monday.

In an op-ed article in The New York Times, Biden, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee's top Democrat, said the Bush administration's effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad had been a failure, doomed by ethnic rivalry that had spawned widespread sectarian violence.

"It is increasingly clear that President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor," said Biden and co-author Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The Trifurcation of Iraq Has Begun," by Tom Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog, 28 February 2005, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/001563.html.

"Sunni Powers Oppose Federalism in Western Iraq," by Mazen Ghazi, Assyrian International News Agency, 24 March 2005, http://www.aina.org/news/20050324135407.htm (from Informed Comment).

Remember Dr. Barnett's post on the falling-apart of Yugoslavia-on-the-Tigris Iraq?

Meanwhile, down south, there are some pretty out-in-the-open dreams about breaking off from the Sunni and Kurdish north. Some of this is a desire to take their oil and leave, which is natural, and some of it is desiring to be away from the real and potential violence elsewhere in Iraq, and that's even more natural. Being built around the port of Basra, there is likewise a stronger desire to connect up with the outside world. The election showing of the Shiite coalition will dampen this some, as the article points out, but it ain't going to go away. We're watching the same dynamics, often economically driven more than by ethnicity or religion, that dismembered the false state that was Yugoslavia. Iraq is a similarly odd historical creation by outsiders (Churchill had a big hand), and it may well have to devolve into smaller bits before it can come back together in larger ones.

It rolls on

Leading Sunni powers took a swipe at calls for a federalism in western Iraq, warning this only plays into the hands of the occupation by contributing to slice the country.

"Such calls only serve the interests of the occupation and fuel sectarian strife by pitting Iraqis against one another," Mothana Harith Al-Dari, spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), told IslamOnline.net on Thursday, March 24

Al-Anbar governor Fassal al-Ka'oud had proposed a federal rule in the predominantly Sunni western governorates of Saladin, Ninawa and Al-Anbar, to face up to the new political reality in the war-torn country.

...

Calls for federalism, however, were quickly endorsed by the Assyrian Democratic Movement, which wants a self-ruled Christian governorate in Ninawa plains.

"Christian villages in Ninawa plains want their own governorate to enhance their political, economic and administrative rights within the state," said Isac Isac, the movement's public relations officer.

If nations and states lined up in the Middle East, the proposed state would be part of Syria.

Maybe it will be.