White House rebuffs Iraqi autonomous regions idea
Iraq should be divided into three largely autonomous regions with less central control to stop the country from tearing apart, a leading U.S. Democrat proposed on Monday, but the White House rebuffed the idea. Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the Bush administration’s effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad had been a failure, doomed to ethnic rivalry that spawned widespread sectarian violence. Full Story