"Any plan for federalization along sectarian lines is playing al-Qaida's game," Reidar Visser, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs told a conference in Washington Wednesday.

Several U.S. policy-makers, most notably Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., have proposed a so-called soft partition of the country into a loose federation of a Shiite area in the south, a Kurdish homeland in the north and a Sunni zone in the west.

But Visser said "for hundreds of years Iraqis have dealt with sectarian violence through traditional mechanisms."

He said al-Qaida had "almost succeeded in destroying Iraqi society" by launching a cycle of murderously violent sectarian attacks.

"The international community … needs to stop thinking about sectarian identities as a basis for a political settlement," he said, calling instead for "a settlement in which sectarian identities are neither repressed nor emphasized but ignored."

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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor