Joe Biden's Iraq plan -- the way out, or recipe for disaster?
The Biden plan for turning Iraq into a federalist state with three different provinces is, as Biden sees it, the only way out of a potential disaster that could dwarf the current occupation of what was once Iraq by the Bush administration. However, there is strong opposition to such a plan from a progressive perspective, such as this piece from Josh Holland and Raed Jarrar.
The fact of the matter is that most of us here want us out of Iraq in some way, shape, or form. But the problem is that everyone has their own plan about how to get out and what to do afterwards. Most of us are agreed on either immediate withdrawal or the setting of a date certain beyond which we will not be in Iraq. But the fear is that we will create some kind of power vacuum that will only make things worse.
Joe Biden says that history shows that in multiethnic states such as Iraq, there are only four possible outcomes, and three of them are bad. A strong military dictator could arise; that is what happened in Iraq before. There could be ethnic cleansing, which is what happened in the former Yugoslavia. There could be a permanent foreign military occupation, like what Bush is proposing. Or, there could be partition or a federalist solution, like what happened in the former Yugoslavia after the Kosovo War.
Biden's federalist solution would be different from what happened in the former Yugoslavia, or what happened with Czechoslovakia, which peacefully broke into two different countries. Instead, it would be closer to what happened with our country after we won independence from the British and we formed a weak Continental Congress which later gave way to the system that we have now.
The Biden plan is outlined here. In a nutshell, here is what it would do:
- Keep Iraq together by giving its major groups breathing room in their own regions and control over their daily lives. A central government would be left in charge of common interests like defending the borders and distributing oil revenues.
- Secure the support of the Sunnis -- who have no oil -- by guaranteeing them a proportionate share of oil revenue and reintegrating those with no blood on their hands.
- Increase, not end, reconstruction assistance but insist that the oil-rich Arab Gulf states fund it and tie it to the creation of a massive jobs program and to the protection of minority rights.
- Initiate a major diplomatic offensive to enlist the support of the major powers and Iraq's neighbors for a political settlement in Iraq and create an Oversight Contact Group to enforce regional commitments.
- Begin the phased redeployment of U.S. forces this year and withdraw most of them by the summer of 2008, with a small follow-on force to keep the neighbors honest and to strike any concentration of terrorists.
The main question I would have is with #3. The question that I would ask is, how would be ensure that the money is being spent where it is supposed to?
One of the key arguments that is advanced in favor of the argument is that Biden's plan is realistic because it reflects what is already happening in Iraq -- or what is left of it. In other words, what is happening now is just a fact of life. There was a heated debate over the federalist plan yesterday here, and part of the purpose is to continue this debate.
Planetclaire4 gave an overview of previous proposals to partition the region; proponents of the plan suggested that partition was needed because of the tensions between the three main ethnic groups:
I've posted about the history of this
ad nauseum, that partition was the original idea of the greatest Mesopotamian expert of the time (1919), and of one who was absolutely trusted by the Mesopotamians, based on the knowledge back then that the Shia, Sunni and Kurds would never trust each other enough to unify. (Google Gertrude Bell for the expert, and google Lloyd George at Versailles for why Bell wasn't listened to.)While I doubt Bell's idea could be made to work now due to the subsequent intermingling of the population, Biden's use of it strikes me as somewhat cagey. If the Iraqis were to accept it, well and good. If they reject the idea, as had al Maliki decisively, also well and good because it could give them something to unite around and thus maybe tend to the problems they should be working on. The problem is that we don't know the percentages of average Iraqis who would and would not accept it. As for the rejection from Iraq's heads of government, we don't know if they reject it out of patriotism, or because--depending on how true the tales of governmental corruption are--their rice bowl would be broken.
One of the arguments against any kind of centralization, brought up by planetclaire4 is that the area was once under Turkish law, and there was no such thing as legal precedent; all of the judges' decisions were made based on who could bribe them the most money. Therefore, there is no real legal basis for the region to go on, and all of the three main ethnic groups have their own laws and customs anyway, hence the need for a decentralized government.
2laneIA, in the diary, bolsters the argument:
Do you notice that Iraq is in chaos, millions of Iraqis are already displaced, the central government is dysfunctional, Iraqis are rearranging into ethnic enclaves by themselves, and our solders are trying to survive a vicious civil war? Don't you think we are close to being past any ability to affect what happens there, and if there is a chance of doing something to help them, we should take it, out of moral obligation if nothing else?
On the other hand, Holland and Jarrar argue that Biden's plan is a blueprint for ethnic cleansing and that it is simply a way to continue the Bush plan of perpetual warfare:
Biden and other supporters of the plan claim that critics at home and abroad have misunderstood the amendment; the senator penned a "setting the record straight" piece on the Huffington Post last week. In it, he wrote that "the amendment will not produce 'bloodshed and suffering' in Iraq" but didn't address the argument. Instead, he dismissed it with a throwaway line more appropriate for someone advocating immediate withdrawal: "It is hard to imagine," he wrote, "more bloodshed and suffering than we've already seen, which has been exacerbated by the failure of Iraq's leaders to stop sectarian violence and produce a durable, widely accepted political settlement." He added: "More than 4 million Iraqis have already fled their homes for fear of sectarian violence, at a rate now of 100,000 every month." It's hard to read that as other than: "Ethnic cleansing is rampant, and therefore we should encourage them to finish the job quickly."
Next, Holland and Jarrar cite Joost Hiltermann, who points out that the Iraqi people are still, despite the civil war, heavily intermingled and therefore resistant to any kind of proposal separating them:
But the concept of soft partition misreads Iraqi realities. Despite sectarian cleansing attempts, Iraqis remain deeply intermingled and intermarried in a mosaic that could be changed only through campaigns of intimidation and mass murder.
Moreover, in poll after poll, a majority of Iraqis has indicated that they wish the country to remain unified. For example, the International Republican Institute reported in July 2006 that 66 percent of Iraqis opposed segregation by ethnicity or sect.
Soft partition advocates counter that the country's new Constitution, which allows for the type of loose federalism that they support, was adopted by a convincing majority in a 2005 referendum. While true, this claim is undermined by the fact that Iraqis voted for the Constitution as a whole, not its individual provisions. And Iraqis were encouraged to endorse it not only by political parties but, in the case of the Shiites, their most senior religious leaders.
The constitutional language on federalism and revenue sharing, in particular, reflected a backroom deal between the Kurdish alliance and only one of the Shiite parties, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic in Iraq (SCIRI), which reached the final compromise at the exclusion of all other parties and Iraqi society.
The main premise of Biden's argument is that Iraq is an artificial construct; however, Holland and Jarrar say that is not the case at all. They explain that Iraq has had a shared history for the last 7,000 years. Abu Khaleel explains this argument:
It started with city states, more than 7000 years ago. For a few thousand years Iraq was the birthplace of quite a number of them. They reached a level of sophistication by the standards of the time, unequalled except by Egypt.
Those city-states were then a new experiment in mankind’s history that produced sophisticated government, writing and record-keeping, the first written laws and work management that allowed people be freed from food gathering and production for personal consumption and allowed many to specialize in crafts. This was the spark that ignited technological and other developments. The very concept of organized society (the first step towards civilization) was started in Iraq through the creation of those early city-states. It seems that these were triggered by two major factors: abundance of produce in the fertile plains of southern Iraq (which allowed farmers to produce food more than their families needed) and the collective effort needed by the nature of irrigation in that region.
Those city states came and went, flourished and dwindled, expanded and decayed for a few thousand years in different parts of Iraq.Most of the time they were in competition and combat with neighboring cities. One of them was called ‘Uruk’ – a splendid civilization that flourished around 3000 BC - which I believe gave its name to the country.
Sargon became the first king to unify what is now Iraq in 2,400 BC. His background resembled Moses'. The argument is that while Iraq/Babylon has risen and fallen over the last several thousand years, they have always essentially remained one people and one country despite the diversity of peoples there.
Next, Jarrar and Holland argue that Biden's plan is based on the faulty premise that Iraq's constitution is written in stone. However, the problem is that, as they mention, Iraq's constitution is still being debated; for instance, the Prime Minister and his cabinet supports a system with more powerful regional governments while the parliament supports a more centralized government.
They state that this provision of Biden's plan (#1)...:
Keep Iraq together by giving its major groups breathing room in their own regions and control over their daily lives. A central government would be left in charge of common interests like defending the borders and distributing oil revenues.
...is "explicit" in its call for the division of Iraq along ethnosectarian lines. The problem they have is that on one hand, in addition to the disagreements about the Constitution, the problem is that the Constitution is not written in stone. In fact, there is an entire committee tasked with the burden of rewriting the Constitution so that it is acceptable to all of the three main political factions. Jarrar and Holland state that if the planners get this part of the Constitution wrong, it would create irreconcilable friction between the Iraqi nationalists and the separatists.
The case against the Biden Plan is bolstered by this series of polls:
Reports of conflict in Iraq may give the impression that the central government is so weak and unpopular that Iraq is on the verge of fragmenting into a loose confederation, and that major sectors of the population are aligning themselves with militias. However, the findings of a new WPO poll of Iraqis suggest a different picture.
Iraqis appear to agree on having a strong central government, and large majorities among all ethnic groups (Shias, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds) want the government to get rid of the militias. Majorities of all groups do not favor a movement toward a looser confederation and believe that five years from now Iraq will still be a single state. Six in ten approve of the job the Maliki government is doing in facing Iraq’s problems—though currently, a slight majority does not think Iraq is going in the right direction.
Thus, it could be argued that far from being a good-faith effort to bring peace to Iraq, it could be argued that Biden's plan is a plan for perpetual occupation through the division of Iraq into ethnic regions and thus furthering the civil and sectarian violence that is already going on. In other words, nationalism is our key enemy in Iraq and we have to be able to defeat the forces of nationalism in order to continue this occupation. Vietnam, one might remember, was lost because the forces of nationalism there were too strong for us. In fact, Jarrar and Holland make this very argument later on in the piece.
And Maliki may well be playing the nationalist card in the Blackwater controversy because he understands the mood of the Iraqi people; he has said that the Blackwater issue is a matter of Iraq's sovereignty as a nation and has accused them of murder in the recent shooting of civilians.
Biden has said that Iraq's leaders were warming up to his idea of federalism. However, Holland and Jarrar spoke to two different political leaders who were strongly opposed to Biden's plan:
Biden insists that Iraq's leaders are with him, despite condemnations from the heads of most of Iraq's political parties. When we reached Nadim al-Jaberi, head of the Shiite nationalist Al-Fadhila Party, he told us that most Iraqis oppose the plan because they understand that Iraq's conflict is primarily political rather than sectarian. "The majority of the Iraqi parliament and the majority of Iraqis are against splitting Iraq into three regions," he said.
The sentiment is likely to be codified soon: Saleh Al-Mutlaq, head of the National Dialogue Front -- a secular party -- told us by phone from Jordan that "Sunni, Shia, and secular groups who control the majority of the parliament are planning to pass a resolution after Eid Al-Fetr [the feast that marks the end of Ramadan] outlawing any attempts to split Iraq into sectarian- or ethnic-based regions."
Finally, there is a common argument among supporters of the Biden plan that challenges the opponents to come up with an alternative. But Holland and Jarrar state that we do not have a right, as an occupying power, to dictate to the Iraqi government what kind of a solution they should offer to their people. They state that the US does not have a right to decide what direction that Iraq should go any more than Saddam had a right to dictate what Kuwait should do in 1991. In other words, the alternative to the Bush plan of perpetual warfare or the Biden federalist plan is to let the Iraqi people decide.