Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison Backs Soft Partition of Iraq September 22, 2007

From the Babylonians site:

Republican Sen. Hutchison Backs Soft Partition of Iraq September 22, 2007

Senator repeats support for separate regions for Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites

By Todd J. Gillman / The Dallas Morning News

12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, September 22, 2007

WASHINGTON – Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison renewed her call Friday for carving Iraq into ethnic enclaves, saying that’s the best way to separate factions and the quickest route to relieving the need for U.S. troops.

“It is so important that this end result be part of the debate,” she told reporters, pushing her support for a nonbinding resolution authored by Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

The resolution would put the Senate on record urging the Bush administration to prod Iraqis into creating at least three semi-autonomous regions, controlled by Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.

The recent status report from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, showed that security is improving in Iraq and that the U.S. troop surge has led to a lessening of violence in some areas, she said.

But, she added, “I don’t think you’re going to have political stability if you don’t have some economic progress,” and the best way to ensure that is to let each ethnic group govern itself as much as possible, while still supporting a central government.

“The ethnic strife is going to hurt the capability to create that economic opportunity,” she said. “We could see a lessening of violence.”

Ms. Hutchison has promoted partitioning for about a year. Critics have included James Baker, the former secretary of state who co-led the Iraq Study Group. Among the objections: multiethnic regions, notably in and around Baghdad, would be hard to carve up without disrupting large populations, and because Iraq’s oil wealth is concentrated in the Kurdish north and Sunni south, it would be hard to win over Shiites until there’s a strong revenue-sharing law that so far has eluded Iraq’s lawmakers.

The Senate is expected to vote on the resolution as early as Monday. Mr. Biden – a Democratic presidential contender and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – has been pushing the idea of a decentralized Iraqi government for more than a year, and he’s offered the plan as an amendment to a pending defense bill.

A dozen senators have signed on, including Ms. Hutchison and three other Republicans.

Said Mr. Biden, “Everyone agrees that there is no military solution in Iraq, only a political solution.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called it “an extremely critical amendment” this week, because it reflects the view that Iraq requires a diplomatic solution.