But the idea was seen by many as unrealistic, and it never won many friends in the Arab world, where officials saw it as an American attempt to partition the country, something Biden insisted he did not intend.
Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and leading champion of the troop surge, said the federalism plan assumed that the process of ethnic cleansing was over in Iraq. In fact, he noted, Baghdad and Diyala province remain to this day very mixed areas of the country. "I think it was built on a fundamental misreading of the situation on the ground," Kagan said.
When Biden's federalism plan came up for a vote last September, it attracted little notice, even though it got 75 votes, more than any other piece of legislation that challenged the president's Iraq policy.
After Democrats took the majority last year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada turned to Biden to help confront the president's proposed troop surge.
Biden was among a group of senior Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin of Michigan, who reached out to Republicans to craft a nonbinding resolution opposing the surge. He and Levin and Republican Sens. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska huddled for days trying to come up with legislation. "We were searching for what their common ground would be," Snowe recalled.
Democrats at the time hoped that if enough Republican senators backed the resolution, they could stop the president, even though the legislation was nonbinding. In the end, however, Biden could get only one Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to back the measure. It later collapsed on the Senate floor.
Reid subsequently asked Biden to take a lower profile on the Iraq issue as he was running for president. Biden continued to push behind the scenes for legislation to de-authorize the war, a move he and others, such as Levin, argued would force the president to begin winding down U.S. involvement without setting a timetable.
But antiwar Democrats like Feingold and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut demanded more aggressive action. Reid decided to back them, and by spring of last year, Biden's more graduated approach had been abandoned. Though Biden continued to hold hearings on Iraq in the Foreign Relations Committee, he would not again be a central player in the legislative fight over the war.
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