Washington: As Iraq edges toward chaos, US Vice President Joe Biden is having a quiet moment of vindication for a grim forecast that was dismissed by the Bush administration.
In 2006, Biden was a senator preparing for a presidential campaign when he proposed that Iraq be divided into three semi-independent regions for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.
Follow his plan, he said, and US troops could be out by early 2008. Ignore it, he warned, and Iraq would devolve into sectarian conflict that could destabilise the whole region.
The Bush administration chose to ignore Biden. Now, eight years later, the vice president's doom-and-gloom prediction seems more than a little prescient.
Old sectarian tensions have erupted with a vengeance as Sunni militants seize entire cities and the United States faults the Shiite prime minister for shunning Iraq's minorities.
While the White House isn't actively considering Biden's old plan, Mideast experts are openly questioning whether Iraq is marching toward an inevitable breakup along sectarian lines.
"Isn't this the divided Iraq that Joe Biden predicted eight years ago?" read an editorial this week in The Dallas Morning News.
If there's a measure of vindication for Biden, it's come at the right time.
After staking his claim to leadership on foreign policy, Biden has watched his record come under sometimes bruising criticism, including former Defence Secretary Bob Gates' insistence that Biden has been wrong on nearly every major
foreign policy decision in four decades.
And as he contemplates another presidential run, Biden's political clout has been eclipsed by that of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Biden's office declined to comment.
"He's been right," said former Sen Ted Kaufman, the longtime Biden aide and confidant who replaced him in the Senate. "But you'll be hard pressed to find an 'I did this' or 'I did that.' He's not an 'I told you so' kind of guy."
Modelled after the 1995 Dayton Accords that produced a framework for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the plan sought to establish an Iraqi state with three largely autonomous regions, one each for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
The central government in Baghdad would handle security and foreign affairs plus distribute the nation's vast oil revenues among the groups, the glue that would hold the three regions together.
The plan became a cornerstone of Biden's second bid for the White House, but he lost to Obama in the Democratic primary.
The Bush administration didn't pursue Biden's plan. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly in 2007 to back it, Obama, then a senator, didn't vote.
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