The Senate's 'Rebuke' to Bush's Iraq Policy Is a Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing

The Senate's 'Rebuke' to Bush's Iraq Policy Is a Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing

By Joshua Holland and Raed Jarrar, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2007.

Let's call Joe Biden's Senate plan to split Iraq in three pieces for what it is: a blueprint for ethnic cleansing and possibly a full-blown civil war.


Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate passed a nonbinding resolution supporting "regional federalism" in Iraq. The measure is a disaster waiting to happen, and should be called what it is: a blueprint for ethnic cleansing and potentially a full-blown civil war.

The clunkily named Biden-Brownback Iraq Federalism Bipartisan Amendment is the latest in a series of calls for a "soft partition" of Iraq into three semiautonomous regions -- split up according to ethnicity and sect -- that appear to be gaining currency in Washington. The idea, championed for more than a year by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., would leave a weak federal government in place in Baghdad to divvy up the oil revenues and maintain the country's borders.

Proponents of the plan deserve credit for understanding that there's no military solution to be found in Iraq -- that a political conflict requires a political fix. This already puts them miles ahead of the administration and defenders of the status quo, and they should be commended for seeking a practical way out of the mess created by the U.S. invasion.

But Iraqis do not live in neat enclaves; 4 million have already been forced to flee their homes by sectarian and separatist militias, and thousands more have been killed in the process. Whatever the intentions of the proponents of the plan might be, calling for more of the same is profoundly immoral, and doing so from the remote confines of Washington conference rooms is reminiscent of earlier eras in which Western powers carved up distant lands by drawing new lines on the map.

The Senate resolution created a firestorm of outrage among Iraq's political class and across the Middle East, which was duly noted by the U.S. media and then relegated to trivia, as is the custom when it comes to the opinions of the Empire's subjects.

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http://alternet.org/waroniraq/65197/?page=entire

:banghead: :sarcasm:

who would lose power, and from the sunnis who don't have oil in their region. (actually as far as I know exactly 2 sunni leaders were angered.) That is no majority of Iraquis!

imbedded links at the link.

It is their country, and we need to get out of it. I imagined that people were looking for a way to give power back to the Iraqis, and not a central Bush puppet government, which will never be able to take the country forward. I worry that everything we (US) has done there will need to be undone. The laws in place now were created by Bremmer for goodness sake. They can't possibly be any good for the country.