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With Surge of Chaos in Iraq, a Familiar Problem Knocks on Biden's Door - New York Times

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Middle East |With Surge of Chaos in Iraq, a Familiar Problem Knocks on Biden’s Door



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Middle East | Listening Post |​​NYT Now





Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a World Cup game on June 16. The president called a meeting on Iraq that same day. Julio Cortez/Associated Press









WASHINGTON — From the first summer of the Obama administration, Iraq has been considered Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s account. But when President Obama called a critical meeting on June 16 to confront the crisis that had suddenly erupted there, Mr. Biden was landing in Brazil to go to a World Cup soccer game.


Mr. Biden, who had been sent to mend the rift left by the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping on Brazil’s president, instead found himself stuck on Air Force Two for 90 minutes, dialing in to deliberate over an issue both he and the president thought they had left behind.


For a second-term vice president who had hoped to shift his foreign policy focus to new horizons in Latin America and Asia, the resurgence of chaos in Iraq is a decidedly mixed blessing.



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It has plunged Mr. Biden into a familiar grind of frustrating phone calls with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the recalcitrant Shiite leader with whom Mr. Obama has little contact. Yet the fact that Iraq is fracturing along sectarian lines could allow Mr. Biden to claim vindication for a concept he proposed in 2006 and was widely dismissed at the time: that Iraq should be split into three largely autonomous regions.




President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden met with their national security team on June 15 to discuss the situation in Iraq. Pete Souza/White House, via European Pressphoto Agency

Either way, Iraq has again landed in Mr. Biden’s lap. How it weathers this latest strife will factor heavily in the legacy of a vice president who has used his long history and robust views on Iraq to position himself as an influential member of Mr. Obama’s war council.


For now, Mr. Biden is saying nothing publicly about a federal, three-state Iraq, in keeping with the administration’s effort to prod the Iraqis to form a unity government. Speaking to reporters in Brazil, the vice president emphasized the need for cohesion, not partition.


“He has not given up,” said Jake Sullivan, the vice president’s national security adviser. “He thinks, even at this late stage, there is the possibility that the Kurds, Sunnis and Shia can get through this government formation process.”



But another senior official was more blunt. “If Iraq is going to stay together, it is going to be close to the model he envisioned,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation. “In putting together the government, there are going to be conversations about federalism and devolving more power to the local level.”


In fact, the White House has quietly begun contingency planning for how the United States would deal with a scenario — considered likely by many officials — in which the three groups are not able to agree on a strong, inclusive government.


There are not many palatable options. Any partitioning of Iraq, analysts say, could lead to even greater bloodshed than Iraq has seen in recent days, with the Sunni militant group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, seizing Mosul, Tikrit and other cities.


Moreover, none of the options being weighed by the administration involve sending in American soldiers to stabilize the situation. When Mr. Obama was winding down the war in 2011, Mr. Biden was among those who argued for leaving a smaller residual force behind — one that would be narrowly focused on counterterrorism.



Critics of the administration argue that this decision left Iraq vulnerable to the chaos that now afflicts it. To some, that outweighs whatever credit Mr. Biden deserves for recognizing the centrifugal forces in Iraq.


“What he was saying about federalism and semi-independent areas, I think there’s nothing wrong with that kind of thinking,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview. “Obviously that was a de facto situation with the Kurds a long time ago. But very honestly, it pales in comparison to his zealous advocacy for getting everybody out.”


Aides to Mr. Biden said it was the Iraqis who opposed keeping even a small American force. And a larger troop presence, they said, might not have prevented the gains made by the Sunni militants, since those troops would not have had a combat role.



The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video


A visual guide to the crisis in northern Iraq.


The vice president, officials said, negotiated with Mr. Maliki in 2012 about establishing a “fusion cell” in Iraq, a joint operation staffed by American and Iraqi intelligence officers that would have improved the capacity of the Iraqi security forces to detect terrorist threats.


Some critics cite the White House’s descriptions of his calls with Mr. Maliki as evidence that the vice president was not tough enough. But Mr. Biden’s aides said these rosy “readouts” bore little resemblance to the blunt tone he actually took in the conversations.


Certainly, Mr. Biden has been a faithful caller. He spoke by phone with Mr. Maliki 11 times in the past year and met with him twice. He called the Kurdish leader, Masoud Barzani, eight times, and the Sunni speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, six times.


“He knows the players, he knows the names of the players’ grandchildren, and that is enormously valuable,” said Antony J. Blinken, a former top aide to Mr. Biden who is now the president’s deputy national security adviser.


When Mr. Obama handed Mr. Biden the Iraq portfolio in June 2009, it was hardly a prize. The president had run for office on his opposition to the war, and he wanted a high-level official other than him to pay attention to it so he could focus on Afghanistan.


By the time Mr. Biden visited Iraq in December 2011 to mark the departure of the last American combat troops, however, he expressed pride that his horse-trading between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds had helped reduce sectarian violence in the country.


“When Barack and I were elected,” Mr. Biden said in an interview, “we had an opportunity to provide what I thought was the missing piece here, which was a 24/7 focus on finding political accommodation among the parties, who looked as though they were on the brink of civil war.”


Now, though, Iraq again looks like the hopeless case it was in 2006, when Mr. Biden’s famous article was published in The New York Times. The essay, co-written by Leslie H. Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed dividing the country into a loose federation with a central government responsible for border defense, foreign affairs and oil revenues. At the time, it was rejected both by Iraqis and policy makers in Washington.


“He still believes in it,” Mr. Gelb said. “But the administration, including Joe, stopped paying attention to Iraq after the U.S. got out. They got involved in other crises, and this fell off the radar screen.”


Mr. Biden’s aides acknowledge that he was eager to turn to other foreign policy priorities after the first term. But, Julianne Smith, his former deputy national security adviser, said: “Nothing ever died down. He was always having to get on the phone with Maliki.”


The question is whether Mr. Biden’s once-controversial views will make him a more persuasive messenger this time. “If he says to them, ‘you’re heading toward partition,’ I think they’re going to take him very seriously,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.




Peter Baker contributed reporting.



A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: With Surge of Chaos in Iraq, a Familiar Problem Knocks on Biden’s Door.




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