By Peter Feaver
The recent Kurdish gambit on a separate constitution is precisely the sort of thing I was worried about in making Vice President Biden the point man on Iraqi political reconciliation. When he was running for president, Biden sought to distinguish himself on the Iraq issue by prominently embracing the plan proposed by Peter Galbraith for forcibly dividing Iraq into three regions. This plan was popular with the Kurds -- no surprise, Galbraith was a long-time supporter of Kurdish interests -- but with no one else in the region (although the Iranians may have secretly liked it). It was panned by independent experts, and the American media generously avoided taking it seriously.
The Kurds may have taken it seriously, however, and their recent actions would seem drawn from the Galbraith-Biden playbook. Of course, one cannot blame Biden for Kurdish obstreperousness, but it is undeniably awkward to have America’s point man on the issue criticizing the Kurds for doing what for years he claimed was the only long-term solution for Iraq.
Biden is hardly the first political leader to be caught undermining his own campaign rhetoric on vital matters of national security. President Bush, himself, campaigned against the idea of using the military for nation-building and then committed the military to two massive nation-building projects in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Biden’s predicament is especially thorny, because to accomplish his new assignment, he must go beyond the pedestrian political hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another. He must also somehow persuade the Iraqis that he no longer believes what he once emphatically said. And he must accomplish this at a time when American prestige and leverage (what the Iraqis call wasta) is steadily diminishing in Iraq.
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