Analysis: Biden's plan for Iraq

WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- Sen. Joseph Biden Thursday said all U.S. troops could leave Iraq by early 2008 if his three-part plan is followed.

Biden, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination next year, told a meeting at the Johns Hopkins University Center on Politics and Foreign Relations Thursday evening, "I have put forward a comprehensive strategy to end this war ... and it has three parts to it.

"The first part is a road map to bring home our troops next year. Secondly, a detailed plan as to what we should leave behind in Iraq, and thirdly a commitment that so long as there is a single American soldier that remains in Iraq we will do everything in our power to protect him or her.

"Each piece in my view is critical," Biden said. "It is not enough in my view to do one without the others."

"The fundamental problem in Iraq, and now even this administration is beginning to realize (it), is that there is a self-sustaining cycle of violence, Sunnis killing Shiites and Shiites killing Sunnis," the senator said.

In order to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq it is essential "to repeal the 2002 authorization for the use of force the president was granted, and I would argue, misused," he said.

"I think it is incumbent upon us to relentlessly push until the Republicans in the Senate -- and we need 17 of them -- stop supporting the president and start backing a more responsible path out of Iraq because that's the only way we are going to end this war on this president's watch. We need 17 Republicans to have a veto-proof Senate in order to be able to do this," Biden said.

Biden also sharply criticized the scope of the U.S. mission in Iraq. "We should dramatically limit the mission of our troops to get them out of the middle of a sectarian civil war and to focus them on a much narrower, and I believe achievable, mission of denying al-Qaida territory, training the Iraqi army and protecting our own personnel," he said. "If we limit the mission in that way there will be no need, no need, to keep 150,000 forces in Iraq. Especially at a time when our military is dangerously, and I emphasize dangerously, overstretched threatening the readiness, retention and recruitment of our armed forces and their ability to deal with other hotspots in the world."

Biden said the United States needed to establish specific political goals for an Iraqi state and reiterated his five-part plan for creating a decentralized federal system there. He wants to establish three regions in one Iraq, share oil revenues, create a regional non-aggression pact, draw back U.S. troops and increase reconstruction assistance.

Biden also urged President George W. Bush to bring in other nations in the stabilization process. The current status quo in Iraq benefits no one but Iran, he said.

"What we have to do, because we have no credibility in this administration, we have to enlist the major powers in the world because they have an interest themselves," Biden said. He identified Germany, Russia and France as having an interest in restoring stability to Iraq.

"Every Democrat running for president of the United States believes this war in Iraq has to end," Biden said. "It matters profoundly in my view how we end it. It matters to our soldiers. It matters to Iraqis. It matters to America's long-term security interests, in my view."