An Iraqi parliamentary committee, in a recent visit to Washington, has reiterated its demands to divide Iraq into three regions in a bid to solve the current problems plaguing the country. These demands have been made several times in the past, and they consist of creating three major regions that enjoy demographic and political unity — Shiite in the south, Sunni in the west and center, and Kurdish in the north.

In both popular and media memory, this idea has been associated with the name of US Vice President Joe Biden, as he was the one to suggest it when he was a senator in 2007. At the time, the idea was opposed by the Baker-Hamilton Co mmission, which was set up by former US President George W. Bush to study the situation in Iraq after the outbreak of civil war in 2006.

This association, however, seems largely misleading, and it has been used to either defend the idea by giving it objective and international dimensions, or to demonize it by saying that the goal of the US war on Iraq in 2003 was to divide the country, in the framework of an ongoing conspiracy theory.

The idea of regions was raised in different ways prior to the US occupation of Iraq. It was adopted by the Kurds decades ago, and translated into the autonomy project of the Kurdish areas, which was announced by the authorities in the mid-1970s. The idea was then put on the agenda of the Salahuddin Conference for the Iraqi opposition forces in 1992, and then discussed in the conference of the same forces in London in 2002.