The U.S. Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on an amendment which calls for partitioning Iraq on ethnic lines, local newspaper the Hill reported Tuesday.
Although the bill, proposed by Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. (D-Del.), a presidential candidate, is almost sure to fail under the 60-vote threshold, it puts other candidates in the Senate in the awkward position of supporting legislation that provides a fellow candidate with a political victory.
The amendment expresses the Senate's sense that the United States should takes steps to encourage the major factions in Iraq to reach a political settlement that divides the country into regions under a weak federal government -- one Kurdish, one Shiite and one Sunni.
Over the weekend, Biden issued a petition to supporters and urged them to contact the three other Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate, namely Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd and Barrack Obama to urge them to support the amendment.
Biden, a long-shot candidate with limited resources, has sought to differentiate his views on Iraq in several different ways from his Democratic opponents, and has accused the other candidates of not taking the political solution in Iraq seriously.
Source: Xinhua
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