ON MONDAY, June 18, some of Washington's "usual suspects" in the controversy over the Mesopotamian war assembled at the invitation of Sen. Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni. The topic for debate was the so-called "plan Z" for Iraq, which Biden has embraced and which calls for a "soft partition" of that country.

With Etzioni moderating, the participants were ten representatives of Beltway culture. I was the only speaker who did not condemn neoconservatism, lash out at President George W. Bush, or declare the Iraq war unwinnable. Other commentators included Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings, Marina Ottaway from the Carnegie Endowment, and two prominent neo-isolationists, Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute and Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute. The Senate hearing room was, to put it simply, filled with the atmosphere of "cut and run."

As redacted by Etzioni in a paper titled "Plan Z: For a Community Based Security Plan for Iraq," the Biden proposal calls for a "high devolution state" in Mesopotamia. Iraq would be broken up into districts with Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia majorities, and such considerable local control as to render the Iraqi national state almost nonexistent. The Etzioni paper included a number of statements to which I objected, based on my own consultations with Iraqi Arab (both Shia and Sunni) and Kurdish intellectuals and clerics, as well my experience in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia-Herzegovina, thanks to the Dayton Agreement of 1995, was repeatedly invoked as

Decentralization of political power is hardly a novelty in global politics-note the recent pro-independence vote in Scotland-and there are obviously worse options for Iraq. But the Biden "solution" is problematical. It uses federalization as a pretext for a partition that, even if in "soft" form, would be an incentive for more, not less, bloodshed. Oil, too often cited, is not the only issue in Iraq on which distinct religious and ethnic communities are at odds. Land and water resources are objects of rivalry. Mixed families and villages would be even more violently divided by partition, exacting psychological injuries for generations to come. The intentional uprooting of communities is simply forced relocation. Supporters of "Plan Z" write in a carefree manner about "voluntary ethnic relocation" in Iraq, but no community in history has voluntarily accepted relocation.

The Biden-Etzioni sketch presents an Iraq in which all groups-Arab Sunnis, the long-oppressed Shia majority, the Kurds-are viewed as sharing equal responsibility for the crisis of the state. But national identity and sectarianism cannot be judged as if they were neutral phenomena. The division in Iraq is primarily a consequence of a long period of domination by Arab Sunnis.

As exemplified by the Iraqi Kurds, nationalist and religious-identity movements can establish stability on the territories they inhabit when the community is homogeneous, its demands are perceived as largely resolved, and the community feels itself to be "masters in its own house." Conflict may then be mainly avoided, as in Québec, Catalonia, or Slovenia. It is for this reason that in Iraqi Kurdistan, as noted in the Etzioni document, "according to Major General Benjamin Mixon . . . because Kurdish areas are patrolled by Kurdish troops, 'there's no need' for an American presence in Kurdistan." I would add that Saudi-financed Wahhabi terror in Kurdistan, led by the so-called Ansar al-Islam, was handily defeated by the Kurds.