Commentary - Daniel Gallington: Federalizing Iraq makes sense for U.S. and Iraq

Biden’s idea is simple: that Iraq be divided into “regions” along religious lines — he doesn’t call it a “partition” but it is the functional equivalent — similar to the solution that has worked reasonably well in Bosnia.

Even if it worked half as well, it could get our country united and behind a nearer-term resolution of the chaos that has become the war in Iraq. Perhaps just as important — the plan also allows for the longer-term protection of key U.S. interests in the region.

The Biden plan really isn’t all that far from the Bush administration — a fact that can’t have been lost on the Democratic leadership of Congress and the various Democratic presidential candidates.

The biggest difference is that the administration’s policy holds out for the hope for the central government in Iraq to be able to develop a democracy by political reconciliation between the religious factions.

If this ever was realistic — which it probably wasn’t — it now seems unattainable. Not only that, but the policy has frustrated the longer-term security mission of the U.S. presence in the region by putting it in the middle of a largely religious strife, which is being skillfully exploited by al Qaeda.

Essential for the success of the Biden plan — and any plan for that matter — is an equitable formula for dividing Iraq’s oil wealth revenues. The transparent administration of this formula would be a primary role for a loosely formed central government coalition, allowing for the most substantive governing of Iraq to be the role of the largely autonomous, religious and tribal-centric regions.

The Biden idea has a number of additional advantages, when viewed from a traditional international perspective:

First, it presents an opportunity for an international conference to embrace the solution, as it removes the most intractable elements — i.e., ethnic and religious — of the present conflict from the discussion.

Second, partition is a de-facto and long-standing way of life in the region anyway, and various plans for it have been successful over the years, even though they are far from perfect solutions.

Third, the solution invests the largest and wealthiest Sunni state in the region, Saudi Arabia, with several incentives to offset the influence of the largest and wealthiest Shiite state in the region, Iran.

Fourth, the solution gives the Turks and Kurds at least the opportunity to settle their long-standing differences.

In addition to the attractive international politics of the implementation of the Biden proposal, the domestic political advantages for the president and the Republican Party to embrace the Biden proposal seem substantial:

First, it peels Bush and Biden away from the prevailing Democratic view that we must begin leaving Iraq right away, a proposition that the Biden plan implicitly acknowledges as unrealistic; in fact, the Biden plan requires a substantial “residual force” to implement the new regions.

Second, it could turn Joe Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, into an advocate of administration policy.

Third, it gives the various Republican presidential candidates the comfort of not having to support the current policy, which is generally unpopular with voters — thus giving the Republican candidates an opportunity to focus on traditional Republican-Democrat political issues. In fact, a couple of the candidates have already endorsed a version of the Biden plan.

And, in the “what’s best for America” department, the proposal allows for our presence in the region for a period, which would be related to the various threats from terrorism.

Can Bush walk away from his current policy? This seems to depend more on timing than anything else, but there is an opportunity for a change with the administration’s upcoming review of the current “surge” operation.

The practical result will probably not be a “democracy” as envisioned by Bush. With the exception of Israel, however, there aren’t democracies in the region anyway, at least as we think of them.

As it becomes clearer that the warring factions in Iraq are simply incapable of a comprehensive political settlement, Bush should evaluate alternative policies that accomplish our primary national security objectives in the region. With some minor adjustments, the Biden plan does that rather neatly.

Daniel Gallington is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington.