BAGHDAD — Iraq’s divided political leadership, in a rare show of unity, skewered a nonbinding U.S. Senate resolution approved in Washington last week that endorses the decentralization of Iraq through the establishment of semi-autonomous regions.
The measure’s advocacy of a relatively weak central government and strong Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish regions has touched a nerve in the Iraqi political arena, stoking fears that the United States is planning to partition Iraq.
“The Congress adopted this proposal based on an incorrect reading and unrealistic estimations of the history, present and future of Iraq,” said Izzat al-Shahbandar, a member of secular ex-prime minister Ayad Allawi’s parliament bloc.
He was reading from a statement also signed by Iraq’s pre-eminent religious Shiite Muslim parties and the main Sunni Arab bloc.
“It represents a dangerous precedent to establishing the nature of the relationship between Iraq and the U.S.A.,” the statement said, “and shows the Congress as if it were planning for a long-term occupation by their country’s troops.”
The nonbinding power-sharing measure was approved in Washington on Wednesday, and resentment appears to be building daily in Iraq. Approved by a 75 to 23 margin, it supports a “federal system” that would create sectarian-dominated regions.
The genesis of the resolution is the proposal by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Council of Foreign Relations president emeritus Leslie Gelb. The pair have advocated dividing the country up along ethnic and regional lines.
Whatever the intended effect by the Senate lawmakers to wade into the debate, the effort has backfired in Baghdad, where the resolution has been interpreted in light of Iraq’s history of foreign occupation from the Ottoman empire to Britain and finally America. Iraqi political parties that have been deadlocked for months have rallied to defend the country’s sovereignty and to defeat any effort by another country to shape Iraq’s fate.
“We refuse the resolutions which decide Iraq’s destiny from outside Iraq. This is a dangerous partitioning based on sectarianism and ethnicity,” said Hashim Taie, a member of the Iraqi Accordance Front, the parliament’s main Sunni representation.
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s political supporters joined their rivals in denouncing the U.S. Senate’s measure.
Even the U.S. Embassy in Iraq issued a statement Sunday distancing itself from the Democrat-led U.S. Senate.
Joost Hiltermann, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group think tank, cautioned that the Senate proposal had played on some of the worst fears of Iraqis and other Arab states.
“In Iraq and the Arab world, the word ‘partition’ is an anathema associated with the worst aspects of imperialist policy,” Hiltermann said.
Meanwhile Sunday, in eastern Baghdad, a U.S. soldier was killed by a bomb and small-arms fire, the military said.
Civilian deaths dropped to 884 in September, according to numbers obtained from the health ministry. It was the lowest death toll in Iraq since June 2006, when 887 civilians were killed.
U.S. and Iraqi forces killed more than 60 insurgent and militia fighters in intense battles over the weekend, with most of the casualties believed to have been al-Qaida fighters, officials told the Associated Press on Sunday.
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