Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Hey Tom: The Biden, Brownbeck, Boxer Amendment passed the Senate 75 pro and 23 con. =) http://www.joebiden.com/newscenter/pressreleases?id=0176

How has someone who voted in favor of the war been "right all along on the subject" ?

Isn't that what Ralph Peters proposed from the beginning?

I tend to agree w/ Sen. Biden. We have to find a way forward in Iraq, not just stay in place and have many more... fallen angels. Not to mention deaths of many poor Iraqis.

He's "been right all along." He's got an actual plan for Iraq, which is clearly the most important and pressing issue. I say we make him president.

Biden is a practical leader, no stupid ideology, no Clintonesque or racial baggage. Out of all the candidates I think he would end up running America and our foreign policy the most intelligent way.

You can be right all along by wanting a horrific dictator deposed and then being realistic about what comes next.

FDR and Ike were right all along and made plenty of mistakes along the way.

How smart they all are depends on your time perspective. Grand strategy is not for the ADHD crowd.

I hate it when the Surrender Monkeys are right (hey I wonder if the French have any good ideas!?)

Am I the only person concerned when an American Senator or Congressman thinks it is a good idea that the business of the US government is to pass laws that divide people by religion, race, or otherwise?

Biden looks good compared to the rest of the crowd. Sort of like the gal who starts to look good at 4:00am after lots of tequilla shooters. How will he look in the morning?

Anyone ask the iraqis what they think?

Not only was he right - A major Sunni leader has just offered the same plan, and a major Shi'ite leader is leaning towards it.

Biden just may be smarter than any of us even give him credit for.

How can anyone vote for anyone else?

Please, get off the "win" and "lose" and "surrender" semantics.

It is a dead language from another era.

We haven't fought a war that was "our war" since 1945. We have to leave such thinking where it belongs--in the past.

But see Reidar Vissar's for a telling critique of the Biden/Gelb plan.
http://historiae.org/biden.asp

"[I]f his partition plans were implemented, Joe Biden would be remembered by Muslims and Arabs around the world in an altogether different way. He would be considered alongside other historical personalities who routinely are being accused by Middle Easterners for having destroyed their region completely: Arthur Balfour, Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot."

Galrahn wrote: "Am I the only person concerned when an American Senator or Congressman thinks it is a good idea that the business of the US government is to pass laws that divide people by religion, race, or otherwise?"

Tom Mull: Actually what Biden is aiming for is a loose federal system that is already allowed for in the Iraqi constitution (and desired by the Kurdish region and , as I recall, two of the Shia regions. This is not a law proscribing anything for the Iraqi's but an initiative to get the Bush admin to go in the direction that most Iraqi's want to go in. The Iraqi's are already will along the way to dividing themselves off by race and religion. All the US can do is manage the Iraqi Ethnic Cleansing and minimize the Iraqi Ethnicide--that's where I see Biden's pragmatism leading. =)

I recall being in a National War College classroom discussing the same option with Peter Galbraith in 2003, before the invasion. His assessment at the time was that it would ultimately be the only workable solution.