Good Move, Fellas

Somehow the Democrats managed to do damage with a nonbinding resolution.

Iraq's prime minister told The Associated Press on Friday that a U.S. Senate proposal to split the country into regions according to religious or ethnic divisions would be a "catastrophe." [...]

The nonbinding Senate resolution calls for Iraq to be divided into federal regions under control of the three communities in a power-sharing agreement similar to the one that ended the 1990s war in Bosnia. Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Joseph Biden was a prime sponsor of the measure.

"It is an Iraqi affair dealing with Iraqis," Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told AP on a return flight to Baghdad from New York where he appeared at the U.N. General Assembly. "Iraqis are eager for Iraq's unity. ... Dividing Iraq is a problem, and a decision like that would be a catastrophe."

Nothing has done more to perpetuate the notion that Iraq is an occupied country than Joe Biden's cockamamie resolution. Chief among the concerns is that nobody in Iraq WANTS a partitioned country, not even the Sunnis (who see an outsized role for themselves in a national government; they essentially want to return to the Saddam era). And having a Western nation vote to divide up a nation in the Middle East calls up all sorts of memories of the British partition circa WWI. Here's Marc Lynch:

As meaningless, non-binding symbolic Senate resolutions go, Joe Biden just managed a doozy. By passing with 75 votes a meaningless, non-binding symbolic Senate resolution in favor of the partition of Iraq, Biden managed to simultaneously: infuriate nearly all Iraqis, who have virtually unanimously condemned the resolution (as have the Arab allies of the US, for that matter); let Senate Republicans off the hook by allowing them to say that they voted for change even though they continue to vote against anything real; and endorse an unworkable plan which would massively increase human suffering while working against American interests in the region and not actually solving the problems.

I know the Democrats feel like they're out of options when it comes to Iraq, but "making it worse" doesn't seem like the best one.

Iraq'd

The White House is dribbling out this white flag to Congress on Iraq, but I tend to think that it's a false flag. They appear ready to endorse the Biden-Brownback decentralized three-state solution, with separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish regions loosely unified by Baghdad, but the implications for that would be, at least in the beginning, a LARGER force, which would be needed to move those masses of people around. Also, you start to run up against the same problems that you have in, say, Jerusalem; the holiest Shiite shrine in perhaps all of Iraq, the battered Golden Dome mosque, is in the majority-Sunni city of Samarra. And these are people's homes and their history from which you're expelling them.

It seems like this shift to talking about the federalism solution, which may be the least worst option, considering the current turmoil in the Iraq government, is a dodge to ensure that troops stay implanted in Iraq forever:

Leading congressional Republicans have signaled that they expect a new U.S. course by September, when a key military assessment is due. Democrats, meanwhile, intend to use other legislative measures to push Bush toward a troop withdrawal, beginning as early as this week's deliberations on a Defense authorization bill.

An accord with Congress could save the White House from refighting the issue every few months. But the odds of a compromise are long.

Bush has said he will not accept any American pullback that would imperil Iraq. Democrats are feeling growing pressure from their antiwar base for troop withdrawals, and could sacrifice a crucial 2008 campaign issue if they agreed to a deal with the White House.

At the same time, a deal could be tempting to lawmakers who see it as a way out of a war that has damaged Congress' reputation as well as the president's. Though Democrats would be reluctant to let Bush off the hook, many "would have a hard time turning down a proposal that offers a real way out," said a Senate Democratic aide.

This is the problem. It's advantageous to both sides to allow them each to declare victory. But something that keeps forces stationed in Iraq far into the future, even with a light at the end of the tunnel, is not going to be sufficient. To Bush, anything short of an additional surge would imperil Iraq, so until he moderates that stance, I don't see any hope at compromise.

What we truly need to do is leave Iraq, and soon, as the Clinton-linked Center for American Progress study states today. All this talk about training Iraqi security forces and moving around pieces on the map to arrive at a mediated settlement is just going around in circles. Furthermore, it's not even something we should be doing. We don't have the answer in Iraq, and as exceptional as we believe ourselves to be, we can't will the answer into being. It's time to recognize that, and go. And I don't see that being the fruits of any "compromise" with the White House. The only way to stop this war is to stop funding it by not generating any further appropriations after a date certain.