A week ago Biden was campaigning in Franklin, NH when a young brunette wearing sunglasses, stopped him in front of the IOOF hall, and point-blank asked him what he stood for.
His answer was of course to stop the war in Iraq.
She asked him, “how are you going to stop it, and what makes you better than any of the other candidates who are also running and say they want to stop it.”
Biden, after acknowledging that she had asked a good question, responded that he seemed to be the only candidate proposing to split the groups into a loose federation, where each ethnic group would basically control their own fiefdom. The other candidates all supported treating Iraq as an one entity composed of all three groups, Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.
“History has shown,” leaning close to her, making it hard to eavesdrop, “that anytime there is sectarian violence, the first thing you have to do, is to separate the parties. It is what we did in Bosnia, when the Yugoslavian country disintegrated; we created different areas of control.
“If each one of these groups in Iraq is no longer being forced to work out that country’s problems together, then infighting among each other takes a back seat to improving their lives.”
He continued, “Each group, needs to prove they can, at first be responsible for their own people.”
You can tell from Joe’s wisdom, that he has raised kids. Anyone like him who has been challenged by young ones, knows that the first thing one does whenever a tussle occurs, is to separate the parties. Only then you can talk to them. If anyone reading this still remembers the tense confrontations of teenage adolescence, one can remember when you are protecting yourself from being beaten, with either a good offense, or a good defense, you tend to hear very little of what is being said at you from the sidelines.
Apparently Condi doesn’t get this. Her leadership in this area seems to be on par with the ineffective high school teacher in the Cheech & Chong comedy skit……”Class,……. Class…….” However, Condi should not feel too alone, for apparently (unless they have changed) her views are right on par with those of Hillary, Obama, or Edwards.
Their policy is to use force to hold the union together, following guidelines similar to those used by the Soviet Union when they took over the “Stans” throughout middle Asia……This may seem appropriate when one looks at the surface of the issue.
But the problem that does not seem to be thought out behind her argument,( perhaps because she does not have kids), is that when one chooses to use force to precipitate a certain event upon ones enemy, they must concurrently make plans to deal with the counterattack that will no doubt occur after that enemy regroups. Not many Democrats would think it wise to walk up to an IED and smack it with a stick. More sensible, they would argue, would be to diffuse it.
But if Iraq could be interpreted as being the IED, and the US was in charge of dealing with it, then the policy that prevailed since Rice has been in charge of policy, has metaphorically been to beat it with a stick.
History has foretold us the outcome. It blows up in our faces.
A better approach, as any bomb expert would tell you, would be to methodically sort through the complex wirings, and cut through either the green or blue wire……. and disarm the thing.
And of all the candidates, Biden is the only one who has done so.
For if one has ever had a sworn enemy who is intent on doing you harm, the expectation that you are to sit down and discuss cooperation in a gentlemanly fashion, is not realistic.
But once you become separated from your enemy, in a secure environment, and you no longer have to give his actions priority over the problems of daily life, then quite possibly somewhere down the road, you may realize that peaceful cooperation would better serve your interests, than constant bickering. In the words of the ninety’s group Outcast, who says it best: ” you got to keep ’em, separated…….”
Or put in a different way, if you were personally given the choice, would you rather pick a fight with your neighbor and retaliate against all of his retaliations against you………….., or repair and fix your house and focus on increasing your own well being and not pay him the time of day?
The rational choice is to increase your own well being. The fastest way to do this is to separate the warring parties, and give them control over their own lives. Let the Shiites govern Shiites, Sunnis govern Sunnis, and the Kurds govern Kurds.
This is nothing more than common sense.
Why no one is pursuing it besides Biden, is beyond me………
3 comments
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May 21, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Duffy
Creating ethnically based states is a recipe for eternal war in the theater. You will have peace within the borders of these states and war with each other. Do the Iraqis get a vote or do we just break them up as we wish? Perhaps the Brits could draw the map as they did such a bang up job the first time.
May 22, 2007 at 5:53 pm
kavips
It all comes down to self control. No one is fully independent, we all owe an allegiance to some political entity or other. The core of exactly what makes the difference between eternal peace and eternal war, is simply whether or not we decide to accept those conditions upon which we are given.
Those conditions we are given, which are never perfect, determine whether or not we will have violence or peace. Although you and I may grumble as we pay taxes to the USA, we would rebel and not mind dying if we were conquered and had to pay our hard earned dollars to China.
However, by some stoke of genius, were China to negotiate a “merge” with us, and our taxes suddenly dropped to zero, allowing our personal wealth to climb 200%, and we received free energy, free medical, and free property insurance, and did so with no loss of freedom, then there are many in this country who would insist upon this ” better deal” and see just such a merger as contributing to human progress.
The point I make is that self determination is a viable, natural, yearning embedded in the human genome, that can be tapped for either good, or bad causes.
Back in the summer of 03, just after “Mission Accomplished” our preliminary teams were traveling Iraq and meeting with the various ethnic groups to determine which path to pursue towards democratization. In a discussion with the Sunni leadership over shared power structures, one of the negotiators told us, “You Americans just don’t understand, we Sunnis will settle for nothing less than ruling ALL of Iraq.”
OK, so they want to play ‘king.” Now scrap that plan. The writing was on the wall even then, but our ideologically blinded administration chose to ignore these snippets of reality and instead, chose a hallucinatory approach towards the fixing of the Iraqi problem. We are still paying for that decision now and will be for the rest of both our lifetimes.
I am glad you brought up the British analogy. However it too supports the cause of splitting of Iraq. For what this republican administration is doing, is just what the British did: merge 3 autonomous states into one political entity. In essence when we do so, we are telling each group of citizens:” we want you to serve this master, forget yourselves.”
Had the US had done to it, what we are attempting to do to Iraq, we, as a country, would not be here………..Instead, immediately after the Revolutionary War, we were left to our ourselves, a group of autonomous states, each printing their own currency, each funding their own military, each taxing imports arriving in state from their neighbors, Realizing this did not work, we chose to regroup 6 years later and then decided to constitutionalize our democracy.
And now, one final point which unequivocally demonstrates how a split Iraq will continue to be more stable than a homogenized country. For this answer, all Americans need to look at Bosnia and see how it has stabilized and moved forward under the far sighted and correct choices made by democratic foreign relations teams, including of course, Joe Biden.
So all Americans need to ask: how are we doing in the middle of our current Trillion Dollar War, now occurring in the Balkan underbelly of Europe?
What? There isn’t one? Can you be serious?
Why not? The Serbs, Croatians, Albanians, Moslems all deeply hated each other far more that do the current Shiites and Sunnies of Iraq.
The obvious difference between the two is simply that in the Balkans we allowed what they wanted to occur (self determination) and in Iraq we tried forcing upon them what we wanted (versus imposed adherence by a foreign power).
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May 25, 2007 at 10:14 am
David Anderson
You and the Senator are correct in the area of a federal Iraq. In fact, we need to look at the 18 provinces. We may need to encourage a redrawing of the lines, but I think a federal solution is a smart one. Democrats are not the only ones looking at that. Senator Brownbeck seems to come to mind.
The problem I have with the Senator is that he wants to withdraw without stabilizing his solution. A total withdraw would only make Iraq 3 waring countries not a federal government. We did not abandon the Balkans when we split it up.
Good to see I am not the only one who watches c-span.