"The Dumbest Man in the U.S. Senate"

When I lived in New York, I used to drive home from my job in Westchester listening to Mark Levin, who often referred to Democratic Senator Joe Biden (Del.) as "the dumbest man in the U.S. Senate."

It appears now that Biden's intelligence was overestimated:

The senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed Monday that Iraq be divided into three separate regions — Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni — with a central government in Baghdad.

In an op-ed essay in Monday's edition of The New York Times, Sen. Joseph Biden D-Del., wrote that the idea "is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group ... room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests."

The new Iraqi constitution allows for establishment of self-governing regions. But that was one of the reasons the Sunnis opposed the constitution and why they demanded and won an agreement to review it this year.

Biden and co-writer Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged the opposition, and said the Sunnis "have to be given money to make their oil-poor region viable. The Constitution must be amended to guarantee Sunni areas 20 percent (approximately their proportion of the population) of all revenues."

Biden and Gelb also wrote that President Bush "must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing and redeploying our troops from Iraq by 2008 (while providing for a small but effective residual force to combat terrorists and keep the neighbors honest)."

How are Biden and Gelb, two reputed political experts, so blatantly incompetent that they don't realize that a divided Iraq would create far more problems than what we see in the current situation?

At the very least, partitioning off the nation along ethnic lines would encourage even more balkanization, and the attendant Sunni vs. Shia fighting would almost certainly intensify instead of abating. This of course would trigger an almost certain exodus of refugees of minority populations from one region into another. Choas is the best result we could hope for in such a fouled design.

In addition, neither Biden nor Gelb touch upon the fact that such a division is likely to inflame an already tense situation between Turkey and the Kurdish-controlled areas in the west, and Iran and the Kurdish region in the east. Both nations fear that a partitioned Kurdish region would be the trigger for Turkish and Iranian Kurds to fight to bring their regions in to a larger Kurdistan based in Iraq. Turkey has already made clear that they view an independent Kurdistan as a threat, and they have already made cross-border attacks, as have the Iranians.

Joseph Biden's idiotic attempt at ethnic segregation would expand Iraq's current sectarian violence into an almost certain regional conflict, encouraging both Turkey and Iran to invade. An invasion by either of these countries would almost certainly create situations where American military forces in the area might be forced into tense situations and possible open combat, either against our NATO ally which s bad enough, or potentially more seriously, a conflict that could easily flash into an ever-expanding, full-on conventional war with Iran.

Such a conflict could see thousands of U.S casualties and perhaps hundreds of U.S dead, but that isn't the worst of it. Coalition forces, with unquestionable air superiority, would send tens of thousands of Iranian conscripts to their graves in such a conflict as well. Through sheer stupidity, Joe Biden would create a situation potentially more deadly than all of the battles of the Iraq and Afghan wars so far, combined.

Is Joe Biden the dumbest man in the United States Senate as Levin contends?

I'd hate to see who could top him.