Biden believes partition the only answer

DUBUQUE, Iowa – Delaware senator and presidential candidate Joe Biden predicted Saturday that within six months, every one of his Democratic rivals would adopt his position on the war in Iraq.

In front of more than 100 people, Biden spoke passionately about the need for a middle road between the plans proposed by his Republican and Democratic counterparts.

“It is the only rational way,” said Biden, who proposes a federal system dividing Iraq into separate states of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. “No one can answer the question that comes next. After you surge, then what? After you cap, what then?”

Biden said that his plan, coupled with his long record in the U.S. Senate, make him the right candidate to step into the office and to immediately take control of the Iraq war.

“The next president is going to be left with no margin for error,” he said. “We have some time, but not a lot of time. There is no time for on-the-job training.”

Biden, who is making his second run for president after a short-lived campaign in 1988, was capping a two-day trip in Iowa in which he also criticized the current administrations foreign policy as a whole.

He repeatedly said the U.S. needs to focus more on the conflicts in Darfur, Sudan; revise nuclear policies; and be wary of the “totalitarian tilt of the Soviet Union.”