Bush opposes dividing up Iraq

WASHINGTON – President Bush flatly told Middle East experts at a private meeting this week that a three-way division of Iraq would only worsen sectarian violence in the country and is “really not an option” for solving the country’s problems, the analysts said Tuesday.

Rejecting a policy alternative that has been gaining support in the U.S. and abroad, Bush told the experts that dividing the country would be “like pouring oil on fire,” recounted Eric M. Davis, a Rutgers University professor and one of the experts who met with Bush on Monday at the Pentagon.

The experts, speaking in interviews, said Bush also signaled that he intended to make no policy changes in Iraq – despite warnings from military leaders and election-year arguments from Democrats that the war is drain on resources and a distraction from the larger war on terrorism.

While the notion of dividing Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish sections has been a minority view since the 2003 invasion, the unrelenting pace of sectarian killing and a stalled reconstruction effort have sparked rethinking among many U.S. officials, their allies and Iraqis.

Some Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish leaders recently have expressed support for the idea, as has Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a potential 2008 presidential candidate, and former State Department officials Peter Galbraith and Leslie Gelb. Advocates of the view have argued that the country is being rapidly torn apart by internal pressure.

Davis said that when he began enumerating the reasons why it would be a mistake to divide Iraq, Bush interrupted.

“He was going, ‘Yes, yes,’ while I was making that point,” Davis said.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Mideast analyst at American Enterprise Institute, said Bush asserted that the partition idea is “not even a starter,” and also made clear that “as long as he’s president, we’re in Iraq.”

Carole O’Leary, an American University research professor and Iraq expert, said Bush “was adamant that, despite any conspiracy theories out there in the Islamic world or anywhere else, the United States is not in there to break up the place.”

White House press secretary Tony Snow elaborated later Tuesday, saying the partition idea was “not practical.”

“It may provide kind of a nice construct – break it apart, and then it won’t be a problem,” Snow said. “The fact is, Iraqis really – Iraqis look upon themselves … as Iraqis, as the descendants of a Mesopotamian civilization that has been around for a very long time. And they see themselves as a nationality, rather than unmeltable ethnic groups.”

Bush’s meeting with the experts was part of a two-day calendar filled by sessions with Cabinet officials and others focusing on Iraq, terrorism and national security issues.

The meetings were scheduled at the same time White House strategists are taking every opportunity to focus – for the third election cycle in a row – on national security as the winning issue in the November elections.