Joe Biden Offers Alternative Proposal on Iraq

I don't know much about Iraq except that the reasons given for going to war there turned out to be fallacies, that we are now caught in a sectarian civil war that has nothing to do with our national interest, and that the place has turned into an unholy mess.
Joe Biden, who has given the matter far more thought than I have, offers his prescription for fixing the mess in today's Washington Post, starting with an acknowledgement of the stark reality of the situation:

The new, central reality in Iraq is that violence between Shiites and Sunnis has surpassed the insurgency and foreign terrorists as the main security threat.

Biden's plan, developed with Leslie Gelb, is to give the factions a greater stake in creating a peaceful, civil society:

No number of troops can solve this problem. The only way to hold Iraq together and create the conditions for our armed forces to responsibly withdraw is to give Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds incentives to pursue their interests peacefully and to forge a sustainable political settlement.

Would it work? I don't know. But it seems to me to offer rational alternatives to the current policy, which boils down to hoping things don't get worse.
As for those who like to complain that critics of the war don't have a single position on what to do about Iraq, I would point out that if those who led us into this mess had been more open to alternative points of view, we might not be in this mess to begin with.