WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua) -- The White House rejected on Monday the idea of splitting Iraq into three autonomous regions and said Iraq should be pluralist and unified.

    "We remain committed to a federal, democratic, pluralist and unified Iraq in which there is full respect for political and human rights," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

    "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," McClellan said.

    McClellan made the remarks after a proposal made by Senator Joseph Biden, along with foreign policy expert Leslie Gelb, on Monday's New York Times.

    Biden is a leading Democrat on the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, while Gelb is the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

    In the article, Biden and Gelb wrote: "the idea is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group -- Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab -- room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests."

    "The first is to establish three large autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad. The Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite regions would each be responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security," Biden and Gelb wrote in the article.

    Moreover, Biden and Gelb also accused President George W. Bush not having a strategy for victory in Iraq but rather hoping to "prevent defeat and pass the problem to his successor." Enditem