> From there, it is a hop, skip, and a jump to Biden proposing Iraq be divided into three separate zones among the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunnis ... completely neglecting the actual ethnic, religious, and power dynamics on the ground.
I don't think that suggestion was made ignoring those dynamics but taking them into account fairly deeply. It may have been problematic, but it's not like there was no non-problematic answer to the problems at the time.
That position became unpopular after the short-term success of the following troop surge in Iraq (and the continuation of the de facto but less complete 2-way partition into a Kurdish entity and the rest of Iraq) resolved the immediate issues it was proposed in response to, but given the subsequent internal instability with regional involvement (the 2014-2017 civil war and the current internal instability and Iran-US proxy war in the country) driven largely by the internal conflict between Shia and Sunni groups outside of the Kurdish region and external intervention in that conflict, I don't think the short-term success of the surge really vindicated it and the situation is sought to make concrete as the correct way forward.
I don't think that suggestion was made ignoring those dynamics but taking them into account fairly deeply. It may have been problematic, but it's not like there was no non-problematic answer to the problems at the time.
That position became unpopular after the short-term success of the following troop surge in Iraq (and the continuation of the de facto but less complete 2-way partition into a Kurdish entity and the rest of Iraq) resolved the immediate issues it was proposed in response to, but given the subsequent internal instability with regional involvement (the 2014-2017 civil war and the current internal instability and Iran-US proxy war in the country) driven largely by the internal conflict between Shia and Sunni groups outside of the Kurdish region and external intervention in that conflict, I don't think the short-term success of the surge really vindicated it and the situation is sought to make concrete as the correct way forward.