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Former head of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Sen. Joseph Biden, for continuing to promote the idea of partitioning Iraq. The two advanced the notion in a May newspaper column, but it’s really a recycling of a similar proposal Gelb floated at the height of the Balkans wars of the 1990s. It was a bad idea for Bosnia and would be a worse solution to Iraq’s sectarian strife — not to mention a defeat for the United States.

The idea is especially mischievous in regard to Iraq’s Shiites. This majority is the bedrock of American and international hopes for a friendly and representative government in Baghdad but is under increasing pressure from Iran, through the firebrand Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and others. Abu Musab al Zarqawi would have liked nothing better than to rule in a separate Sunni state, the more impoverished and isolated the better.