McCain Distorts Biden's Plan for a New Iraq

by Alyssa Keninger and Kristin Simpson

In an interview on CNN’s “American Morning” John McCain said,

“Joe Biden said Iraq had to be broken into three different countries. One of the more cockamamie ideas that I’ve heard in a long, long time.”

Did Joe Biden really propose that Iraq should be split into three different countries?

The story starts back on May 1, 2006. Joe Biden, along with Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council of Foreign Relations, worked together to develop a plan for Iraq dividing the nation into three regions, not countries.

A New York Times op-ed article written by Biden and Gelb sheds light on the origins of their plan as well as some of the details of their plan for Iraq. Their idea originated from the splitting of Bosnia into sections for Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The Bosnian government still existed; it was just broken into these smaller regions under the central government. Over the past ten years, Bosnia has developed into a more peaceful nation, and the central government is gaining strength.

Biden’s actual plan for Iraq is similar to this plan from Bosnia. It does not split Iraq into three countries; it simply splits it into three regions. There is one region for each major religious group, Shiite, Kurds, and Sunni. These regions would be in charge of their own domestic laws, internal security, and administration, much like our states. These separate regions all fall under one central Iraqi government that controls foreign policy, border control, and oil revenues. The plan also included laws protecting women and other religious minorities as well as creating a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Biden believes this plan is a good option that should be considered, but he says there is evidence that it is already taking place in an effective manner. On board his plane, he told reporters,

“They may not want to call it what I was talking about. But the end result is, there is a lot of autonomy in the Anbar province today. There is a lot of autonomy up in the Kurdish area today. And there is increasing autonomy in the Shia regions.”

There have been many U.S. and Iraqi officials that have supported the Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq. Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, supported the Biden-Gelb plan, saying Iraq needed,

“more efficient regional government leading to substantial decrease in the level of violence, to progress towards the rule of law and to functioning markets could then, over a period of time, give the Iraqi people an opportunity for national reconciliation — especially if no region is strong enough to impose its will on the others by force.”

The National Security Advisor to Iraq, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, said the following of Senator Biden and his proposed plan for Iraq in a CNN interview,

“I don't think Senator Biden has said that Iraq should be divided into three sections. What I think – and I can't agree more with Senator Biden and his article, and I think he is a very well-informed person. What we are talking here – and he’s talking about Iraqi constitution. The constitution of Iraq has said very clearly that you can form provinces, regions, federal – this is a democratic federal system, and any two or three or nine or 10 provinces can get together and form a region, and form a federal unit. And this is exactly what Joseph Biden is saying, or I believe when I read his article… I think Biden’s idea is a good idea, with some modification because it’s very compatible with our permanent constitution, which was ratified on the 15th of October last year.”

Lesson: John McCain stating that Biden called for separate countries in Iraq is stretching the truth. There is a large difference between separate regions and separate countries. John McCain and Joe Biden obviously have different opinions on what is the right move to make in Iraq, but he has made a crucial misquote of Biden’s plan, drastically changing the way his audience would judge the Biden-Gelb Plan.