Mereja.Forum

[TGAA]

Joe Biden has defended his vote in favor of the Iraq War, but his plan to divide the country along sectarian lines might have made a bad situation worse.
Robert MackeyRobert Mackey
September 6 2019, 3:03 p.m.
Become
a member

Asked this week to respond to criticism of his judgement on Iraq, like his Senate vote to authorize the use of force in 2002, and his much-derided later proposal to divide the country in three along sectarian lines, Joe Biden laughed and assured Asma Khalid of NPR that “the vast majority of the foreign policy community thinks it’s been very good.”

It was not clear if the former vice president had any specific foreign policy experts in mind, but the interview was recorded just after the death of Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations who advised Biden on Iraq. As Biden recalled in a statement on Sunday, three years earlier, Gelb had co-authored his 2006 plan to pave the way for the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq by segregating the country’s three major ethno-religious groups — Arab Shias, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds — into self-governing regions.

“Whether it was overseeing the Pentagon Papers in his early days, pushing the Council on Foreign Relations to open itself to new members and new ideas, or finding himself next to me on a plane in 2006 and spending the entire flight hammering out a new proposal for Iraq, Les was never afraid to stake out a position outside the mainstream because he thought it was the right thing to do,” Biden wrote. “Our Biden-Gelb proposal to federalize Iraq wasn’t popular in Washington at the time, but I still remember that plane ride as one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever taken — because I got to spend it trading ideas with one of the best foreign policy minds our country has ever known.”

Biden’s description of how enjoyable it was for him to work with Gelb on a plan to remake multiethnic and multiconfessional Iraq into three states, partitioned along ethnic and religious lines — which prompted dismay from Iraqis and condemnation from experts on the region — is a reminder of just how removed from reality Washington’s foreign policy community was and still is when it comes to dealing with the unintended consequences of American military interventions.

Gelb himself seemed more aware of the dangers of being part of what Ben Rhodes, a former Obama aide, called “the Blob,” the permanent, bipartisan American foreign policy establishment whose members move in and out of government, between stints in academia and the opinion pages of the nation’s leading newspapers.

In an analysis of the failings of the American media in the run-up to the war in Iraq, written in 2009, Gelb was critical of the role think tanks like his had played in pushing for it. “My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community,” Gelb wrote, “namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

In his NPR interview this week, Biden was less willing to admit his support for the war a misstep. He defended his vote in favor of the war by claiming that, before he cast it, “I got a commitment from President Bush — he was not going to go to war in Iraq.”

“He looked me in the eye in the Oval Office,” Biden recalled. “He said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors in, into Iraq, to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program. He got them in and before you know, we had ‘shock and awe.’ Immediately, the moment it started, I came out against the war at that moment.”

While Biden was quick to criticize the conduct of the war, and George W. Bush’s decision to attack without United Nations support, it is simply not true that the then-senator from Delaware “came out against the war” after the first strikes on Baghdad on March 20, 2003.

Four months after the American attack, Biden gave a staunch defense of the invasion to a roomful of foreign policy experts at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the President of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today,” Biden said on July 31, 2003. “It was a right vote then, and it’d be a correct vote today.”

Citing Saddam’s supposed defiance of U.N. security resolutions to end his pursuit of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, Biden called the war necessary. “Contrary to what some in my party might think, Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with sooner rather than later,” Biden said. “So I commend the president. He was right to enforce the solemn commitments made by Saddam. If they were not enforced, what good would they be and what value those institutions?”

As Biden acknowledged this week, the plan to divide Iraq along ethnic lines he cooked up with Gelb was criticized at the time as more likely to incite than tamp down sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing, as it had early in the war in Bosnia and following the partitioning of Ireland, India, and Palestine in the last century. In each of those prior cases, partition, which looked good on paper and was accepted enthusiastically by extreme nationalist/segregationist leaders in each place, had the same result in practice: It encouraged violent sectarian cleansing and the destruction of the multiethnic societies that had existed in those territories for centuries.

After they published the idea on the New York Times op-ed page, in May 2006, “It got a lot of attention — almost all negative,” Gelb told Evan Osnos of the New Yorker in 2014.

But when he ran for president in the 2007 Democratic primary, Biden found it useful to pivot from questions about his vote in favor of the war to discussing his plan to end it. At a debate in Iowa in September 2007, Biden said that, as president, he would push Iraqis to embrace his plan for a federal system modeled on the division of formerly multiethnic Bosnia into regions for each of its three major ethnic groups: Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs.

[Abe Abraham]