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

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.

Biden and other supporters of the plan claim that critics at home and abroad have misunderstood the amendment; the senator penned a "setting the record straight" piece on the Huffington Post last week. In it, he wrote that "the amendment will not produce 'bloodshed and suffering' in Iraq" but didn't address the argument. Instead, he dismissed it with a throwaway line more appropriate for someone advocating immediate withdrawal: "It is hard to imagine," he wrote, "more bloodshed and suffering than we've already seen, which has been exacerbated by the failure of Iraq's leaders to stop sectarian violence and produce a durable, widely accepted political settlement." He added: "More than 4 million Iraqis have already fled their homes for fear of sectarian violence, at a rate now of 100,000 every month." It's hard to read that as other than: "Ethnic cleansing is rampant, and therefore we should encourage them to finish the job quickly."

As Joost Hilterman of the International Crisis Group wrote:

Despite sectarian cleansing attempts, Iraqis remain deeply intermingled and intermarried in a mosaic that could be changed only through campaigns of intimidation and mass murder.

The facts can't be ignored. According to a survey conducted last month for the BBC, half of all Iraqis surveyed said that they live in a mixed neighborhood, and about a third of those said that a "separating of people" according to sect had taken place in their communities. But the key finding, and one that speaks directly to the "soft" partition plan, is that 7 out of 10 people who said that "separation" had occurred in their area said that it had been "mainly forcible" in nature. That is, in ordinary discourse, known as ethnic cleansing.

There's no getting around that.

Supporters of the plan claim that Iraq is an "artificial state" cobbled together by colonial powers, and that Iraqis have little in the way of national identity. This is one of those narratives that's as wrong as it is popular; Iraq has long existed as a nation of people with a powerful shared identity and a collective history that goes back 7,000 years. Iraqis weren't a collection of foreigners shipped to Iraq by the British -- they were living there long before the "artificial line" was drawn around them, just as the Egyptians, and dozens of other peoples around the world, had existed for thousands of years before their current borders were drawn.