GERMANS LOVE OBAMA -- CAN'T VOTE

IRAQIS HATE BIDEN -- CAN'T VOTE

All for the best, I guess, but.......

I always had the feeling that Gibberin' Joe Biden's plan for a tripartite division of Iraq along sectarian lines had been hatched without the least interest in what the Iraqis wanted for themselves -- even if it might possibly work, it was still something an American had no business advocating within the American Congress.

Now we know that the Iraqis were keeping an eye on Joe too, and were in complete agreement with me. (I always had the feeling a lot of them were pretty smart....)

Reuters (of all people!) reports the story. Money Quote Music to mine ears:

Senator Joe Biden may be one of the only U.S. politicians that can get Iraq's feuding Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish politicians to agree. But not in a good way.

"This choice of Biden is disappointing, because he is the creator of the idea of dividing Iraq," Salih al-Mutlaq, head of National Dialogue, one of the main Sunni Arab blocs in parliament, told Reuters. "We rejected his proposal when he announced it, and we still reject it. Dividing the communities and land in such a way would only lead to new fighting between people over resources and borders. Iraq cannot survive unless it is unified, and dividing it would keep the problems alive for a long time."

Tigerhawk weighs in with his take:

Anyway, it is a reflection of the diminishing political significance of the Iraq war that Barack Obama, who secured the Democratic nomination in part by making much of his opposition to the war and his plan to withdraw our troops on a fast schedule, is now able to pick as his running mate a senator who voted for the invasion in 2002 and whose favored "solution" would have required more rather than less American involvement in Iraqi domestic politics.

Duh.

"We rejected his proposal when he announced it..." Funny, I don't recall hearing that on Anderson Cooper 180 or reading it from the Paper of Record. Funny.

Maybe next time Joe will remember to ask them first.