Beyond the Dome

Sounds like Barack Obama and Joe Biden have figured out a way to get on the same page with Biden’s Iraq plan. Namely, the one where Iraq gets divided up into three regions — the signature plan of Biden’s own run for the presidency before he and Obama joined forces.

Biden’s plan — written with Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations — would turn Iraq into a loose federation of Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions with broad autonomy to run their own affairs, leaving the central government in charge of only common interests such as border security, foreign affairs, and the distribution of oil revenues.

It was a controversial plan, criticized by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and even the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which posted a statement on its Web site last fall declaring that “attempts to partition or divide Iraq by intimidation, force or other means into three separate states would produce extraordinary suffering and bloodshed.”

But Biden insisted the critics were wrong, and that the plan was about federalizing Iraq, not partitioning it. And the Senate seemed to agree. In September 2007, on a 75-23 vote, it adopted a non-binding “sense of Congress” resolution endorsing the Biden plan — a great talking point for his presidential campaign. “I’m the only one with a clear plan adopted by a majority of the foreign policy establishment, 75 senators,” Biden boasted in November 2007.

Of course, a 75-23 vote means two senators weren’t there to an express an opinion. Any guesses? Why, of course — Barack Obama and John McCain.

Now, McCain has criticized the Biden plan, telling CBS News that he “disagreed with him from the time he voted against the first Gulf War to his position where he said you had to break Iraq up into three different counties.”

Biden’s team, however, says Obama endorsed the plan at the time and continues to support it — with a crucial qualifier: It has to be what the Iraqi people want.

“Senator Biden and Senator Obama continue to believe that federalism is a good solution if that’s what the Iraqis decide,” said Biden spokesman David Wade. “That was the resounding bipartisan message the Senate sent last year, passing the Biden amendment which Senator Obama endorsed. The Iraqis must now do the tough work and reconcile their differences to chart their own future, and we should not be in the position of spending $10 billion a month in Iraq and distracting ourselves from the war in Afghanistan.”

On a rhetorical level, at least, the merging of the Obama and Biden foreign policies has begun.