03 May 2006
A key Senate Democrat is defending his proposal to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions with a central government in Baghdad. Senator Joe Biden denies Bush administration assertions that the plan represents a partition of the country, saying it is aimed at keeping the country unified.
A key Senate Democrat is defending his proposal to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions with a central government in Baghdad. Senator Joe Biden denies Bush administration assertions that the plan represents a partition of the country, saying it is aimed at keeping the country unified.
When Senator Biden argued in an article in the New York Times earlier this week that Iraq should be divided into Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish autonomous regions, with a central government in Baghdad, the idea was immediately rejected by the Bush administration, which said it amounted to a partitioning of the country.
An influential Republican senator, Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner, has called the proposal constructive.
October 7, 2006 New York Times
Senator John Warner (R-Virginia), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, fresh from a trip to Iraq, on the war:
“I assure you, in two or three months, if this thing hasn’t come to fruition and if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function, I think it’s a responsibility of our government internally to determine: Is there a change of course that we should take? And I wouldn’t take off the table any option at this time.”
If Senator Warner is now saying that he won’t rule out withdrawal — even as, nationwide, Republican congressional candidates are saying “stay the course” — this is a huge crack in the dike of Republican intransigence.
Ms. Collins, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, echoed Mr. Warner’s calls for a shift in strategy in Iraq. “When Chairman Warner, who has been a steadfast ally of this administration, calls for a new strategy,” she said, “that is clearly significant.”
She said the current approach, which she attributed to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, had not led to an overall reduction in violence or any prospect that American troop levels would come down soon.
“We’ve heard over and over that as Iraqis stand up, our troops will stand down,” Ms. Collins said. “Well, there are now hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops and security forces, and yet we have not seen any reduction in violence.”
Democrats, who have been using their fall election campaigns to tap into intense voter dissatisfaction with the way that Mr. Bush has handled Iraq, quickly seized on the Warner remarks, circulating them in e-mail messages to reporters. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, convened a conference call on Friday afternoon to hammer home the theme that even Republicans believed that the administration must change course. “Warner’s statement is an important, important statement and, I hope, a turning point,” Mr. Biden told reporters.
He that at least two Republican colleagues other than Mr. Warner had told him that once the election is over, they would join with Democrats in working on a bipartisan plan for bringing stability to Iraq. Echoing Mr. Warner’s language, he said, “I wouldn’t take any option off the table at this time. We are at the point of no return.”
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Third, entirely outside the constitution, there is the possibility of a military coup d’etat. Rumors of a coup have swirled in Baghdad for at least a year. Over the weekend, when Maliki announced a sudden, and unprecedented, curfew banning vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the entire capital, there were reports that an army coup d’etat had been thwarted. One Iraq expert I talked to told me that perhaps some of the Iraqi army units being moved into Baghdad as part of the current crackdown might be candidates to seize power in the Green Zone. Of course, such an action would have to be encouraged and sponsored by the U.S. command in Iraq and the CIA, which—according to Iraqi sources—has a firm hand on Iraq’s own intelligence service. But a military coup would be a very brutal and bloody affair, instantly pitting the more Sunni-friendly army against the Shiite establishment and its paramilitary forces. On the other hand, Iraq’s military, unlike the police and Interior Ministry forces, has earned the grudging respect of many Iraqis, who see it as more neutral and even nationalist force.
Fourth, there is an option somewhere in between the second and third options I’ve just outlined, namely, the imposition of a strongman—perhaps someone like former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi—by the military, but with the military acting behind the scenes. It would depend on getting at least passive support from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has despaired of Iraqi politics of late and withdrawn. This option would have an exceedingly high degree of difficulty, however, and this week Allawi, in London, denied rumors that he is involved in plotting a coup d’etat.
But options like these are being actively bruited about inside and outside the Bush administration. All of them are high-risk strategies—and because U.S. involvement in such schemes would likely be revealed in short order, it would mean that any Iraqi government created in such circumstances would suffer enormously from being seen as a U.S. puppet.