JOE BIDEN, SECRETARY OF STATE? He’s certainly been impressively forthright in the debates, and as Helene Cooper reports in the New York Times, his plan to partition Iraq into Shiastan, Sunnistan, and Kurdistan is gaining traction in Washington. Cooper writes:

Foreign policy analysts…pointed out that breaking up Iraq could cause bloodletting (as if that isn’t happening now) in Iraq’s urban areas. While Sunnis predominate in the western part of the country, Kurds in the north, and Shiites in the south, Iraq’s cities are not as homogeneous. Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul don’t have clear geographical lines separating the main groups.

Or at least they didn’t. The reality is, Iraq’s cities have become far more homogeneous recently as terrified residents have fled areas where their ethnic group doesn’t predominate. The neighborhoods around the edges of Baghdad have already experienced a lot of ethnic cleansing.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.