Sen. Biden: Iraq should be divided into 3 regions - Yahoo! News

Sen. Biden: Iraq should be divided into 3 regions - Yahoo! News: "Mon May 1, 6:06 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
Iraq should be divided into three largely autonomous regions -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- with a weaker central government in Baghdad, Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record) said on Monday.
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In an op-ed article in The New York Times, Biden, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee's top Democrat, said the Bush administration's effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad had been a failure, doomed by ethnic rivalry that had spawned widespread sectarian violence.

'It is increasingly clear that
President Bush does not have a strategy for victory in Iraq. Rather, he hopes to prevent defeat and pass the problem along to his successor,' said Biden and co-author Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Iraq's Sunnis, the driving force behind the insurgency, would welcome the partition plan rather than be dominated by a Shiite-controlled central government, Biden said.

He said the division of Iraq would follow the example of Bosnia a decade ago when that war-torn country was partitioned into ethnic federations under the U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords."