WASHINGTON, May 1: Iraq should be divided into three largely autonomous regions with less central control to stop the country from tearing apart, a leading US Democrat proposed on Monday, but the White House rebuffed the idea.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the administration remained committed to a unified Iraq.

“A partition government with regional security forces and a weak central government, as you are referencing, is something that no Iraqi leader has proposed and that the Iraqi people have not supported,” he said.

President George W. Bush is facing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, partly due to the increasingly unpopular Iraq war.

Democrats are trying to ‘distract attention away from the real progress that is being made’, McClellan said.

“It’s unfortunate those Democrats refuse to recognise that a new unity government has just recently been formed, which really lays the foundation for more progress moving forward.”

Bush sent Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Baghdad last week to show support for the newly named prime minister after months of deadlock.

“We believe this is a turning point for the Iraqi citizens and it’s a new chapter in our partnership,” Bush said after being briefed by Rice and Rumsfeld on Monday. “This new government is going to represent a new start for the Iraqi people. It’s a government that understands they’ve got serious challenges ahead of them.”

Decentralisation: The Democrats proposed that dividing Iraq between the three groups could prevent it from descending irrevocably into the sectarian violence which is already killing hundreds of Iraqis every month.

Senator Joseph Biden and foreign policy expert Leslie Gelb wrote in an opinion piece in New York Times: “The idea, as in Bosnia, is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralising it, giving each ethno-religious group — Kurd, Sunni and Shia — room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests,” they wrote.

Biden, the Democrat leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Gelb, former president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, evoked the 1995 Dayton Accords on Bosnia as a model for Iraq.

The accords, reached between rival leaders from war-wracked Bosnia, “kept the country whole by, paradoxically, dividing it into ethnic federations, even allowing Muslims, Croats and Serbs to retain separate armies,” they noted.

“With the help of American and other forces, Bosnians have lived a decade in relative peace and are now slowly strengthening their common central government,” as well as disbanding the separate armies.—Reuters/AFP