Finally, were it not for the national spotlight on his Iraq farrago, Biden would be best known for his relentless appeasement of Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of jihadist terror. Along with top members of Clinton’s inner circle, Biden was in the vanguard of foreign-affairs “engagement” enthusiasts who got goo-goo eyes in 1997 when the Islamic Republic’s then-president, Mohammed Khatami, proposed a “dialogue between civilizations.” The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps had only recently assisted Hezbollah in bombing the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, murdering 19 members of the U.S. Air Force. And Iran was busily pursuing its nuclear aspirations. Still, as American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin recounts, Biden stubbornly pushed for cultivating Iranian “reformers” and encouraging trade and dialogue to bring the mullahs around. The European Union followed just such advice, increasing trade threefold with Iran, which promptly diverted 70 percent of the haul to its military and nuclear programs. The mullahs responded to this sensitive diplomacy by installing as their president a hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is more clearly reflective of the “Death to America” philosophy.
As the Iranians laughed all the way to the bank and continued killing Americans in Iraq, Congress voted last year to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organization, a move that imposes economic sanctions. Only 22 senators opposed that designation; Biden and Obama were prominent among them. That called to mind the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. As policymakers considered potential responses to the attacks, Biden had a brainstorm. “Seems to me,” he told Foreign Relations staffers, that “this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”
Yes, give them appeasement....that worked so well for Neville Chamberlain, now didn't it? This is not the foreign policy experience one should brag about...but wait, there is more:
Biden is first and foremost a combative partisan, but he modulates his left-wing orientation in accordance with public opinion, following the polls slavishly when exigencies like 9/11 arise.
When a Democrat is in the White House, Biden’s internationalist moralism proves remarkably flexible. During the Carter administration, Biden’s easy cynicism made an impression on the Soviets. When Biden traveled to Moscow in 1979 for discussions about the SALT II treaty, Vadim Zagladin, deputy head of the Central Committee’s International Department, noted in a memo (later obtained by the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky) that Biden and his companion, Sen. Richard Lugar, had not raised human-rights concerns — the duo said they didn’t wish “to spoil the atmosphere with problems which are bound to cause distrust in our relations.” “Unofficially,” Zagladin recounted, the senators “were not so much concerned with solving a problem of this or that particular citizen as with showing to the American public that they do care for ‘human rights.’ . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely don’t care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.”
Is this someone who will be able to go against Putin? I think not...But wait:
But if Iraq is the topic, a more interesting debate would pit Biden against . . . Biden. By comparison, John Kerry is a paragon of consistency: Biden was not merely for the Iraq War before he was against it; he was also against it before he was for it.
As President George H. W. Bush launched the 1991 Gulf War to drive Saddam Hussein’s marauding army out of Kuwait, Biden argued passionately against doing so — a position he later admitted was a mistake. He subsequently morphed from Iraq dove to Iraq hawk, a transformation that happened to coincide with the election of a Democratic administration. In 1993, when Bill Clinton ordered a cruise-missile attack on an empty Iraqi intelligence headquarters in response to Saddam’s assassination plot against Bush, Biden was a staunch supporter. By early 1998, the born-again hawk was imploring Clinton to take military action against Iraq. Worried about the dictator’s “ability to produce the most deadly weapons known to mankind,” Biden warned that, “left unchecked, Saddam Hussein would in short order be in a position to threaten and blackmail our regional allies, our troops, and, indeed, our nation.”
Though he now repeats the Left’s charge that the Bush administration willfully misconstrued intelligence coming out of Iraq, the Clinton-era Biden dismissed the very notion that there existed any reliable intelligence on Baghdad’s arsenal. “As long as Saddam’s at the helm,” he inveighed during a September 1998 hearing, “there is no reasonable prospect [that] . . . any . . . inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out . . . the entirety of Saddam’s [WMD] program.” Along with John McCain, Biden agitated for the Iraq Liberation Act, which made seeking regime change in Baghdad the policy of the United States. And in December 1998, the Delaware Democrat strongly backed Operation Desert Fox, in which Clinton ordered four days of bombing attacks without congressional authorization or Security Council approval.
By late 2001, a Republican was in the White House and post-9/11 polls reflected public demand for robust action against terrorists and rogue states. Biden comfortably reprised his Iraq saber-rattling. Al-Qaeda’s atrocities convinced him that the assurance of superpower retaliation was no longer sufficient to discourage America’s enemies. It didn’t matter to him that Iraq was not an imminent threat; Biden saw the economic sanctions faltering, presumed Iraq’s weapons programs remained viable, and argued that U.N. resolutions should be strictly enforced. “If we wait for the danger from Saddam to become clear,” he reasoned, “it could be too late.”
By the summer of 2002, Biden was publicly stating that war with Iraq was a virtual certainty — tracking his 1998 assertion that “the only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone . . . . It’s going to require guys . . . in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down.” Countering critics of his October 2002 pro-war vote, he insisted, “I do not believe this is a rush to war. I believe it is a march to peace and security.
. . . [Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons.” Though Biden predicted a lengthy, difficult battle, he stressed the imperative of persevering: “We must be clear with the American people that we are committing to Iraq for the long haul; not just the day after, but the decade after.”
Biden hedged his bets, of course, co-sponsoring a failed resolution that would have called on the administration to exhaust all diplomatic options. Biden always favors exhausting all diplomatic options — chatter, after all, is inexhaustible, a proposition the loquacious senator often is at pains to prove. The resolution was a bid for wiggle room — take credit for success but second-guess if things get tough before that “decade after” rolls around. Still, as the March 2003 invasion neared, Biden was adamant: “The choice between war and peace is Saddam’s. The choice between relevance and irrelevance is the U.N. Security Council’s.”
POLICY OF CONVENIENCE
For all Biden’s twaddle about doctrines and concepts, there is a simple technique for divining this foreign-policy solon’s bobs and weaves: Consult the polls and the calendar. His opposition to the Gulf War was an example of Democrats’ post-Vietnam squeamishness about military actions abroad. His 1998 hawkishness dovetailed with growing public anger after the U.S. embassies in East Africa were bombed by bin Laden, in whose activities the Clinton administration suggested Iraq was complicit. Post-9/11, Biden was a top adviser to Senator Kerry’s campaign. Convinced that Democrats could not win unless the public believed they took national security seriously, he pushed his reluctant candidate to talk tougher. Over time, Iraq became more difficult and the expected caches of WMD failed to materialize, but as long as the mission enjoyed public support, Biden maintained that Saddam had been both a long- and a short-term threat to the United States, as well as an “extreme danger to the world.” Even a year after the 2004 election — which, the senator told the The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the Democrats lost because voters decided Bush was strong and Kerry weak — Biden declared, “The decision to go to war was the right one.” The ensuing problems, he elaborated, stemmed from the conduct of the mission, not the mission itself.
But change, we now know, was in the air. Howard Dean, who had risen from the fever swamps to the cusp of wresting the nomination from Kerry, was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Biden was eyeing a presidential run of his own. Though he scoffed that “no goddam chairman’s ever made a difference in the history of the Democratic party,” Biden couldn’t help but appreciate the declaration of MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser: “It’s our party. We bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.” He couldn’t help but notice the elevation of Barack Obama. By the fortuity of not being in the Senate in 2002, Obama had been spared the need to cover himself and his party with a vote for war. As an inconsequential state legislator from an ultra-Left Chicago district, Obama could afford to oppose the invasion of Iraq. And now that opposition was gaining him traction.
The result was a one-eighty that would have been comical if the stakes hadn’t been so high. The Foreign Relations chairman turned against the war with a vengeance, clinging to the bogus narrative that congressional Democrats had been gulled by the administration’s “manipulation of intelligence” — intelligence Biden had reviewed himself. Biden characterized that intelligence as worthless because of Saddam’s duplicity, and superfluous because “everyone in the world thought [Saddam] had [WMD]. The weapons inspectors said he had them.” After years of calling for a surge in U.S. forces to quell the post-invasion insurgency, Biden bitterly opposed the surge once Bush ordered it in late 2006 — when the Democrats’ presidential debates were on the horizon. At a January 2007 hearing, he thundered: “Why do we want to stop the surge? We don’t agree with the mission.” Of course “the mission,” defeating al-Qaeda and securing Iraq for “the long haul,” was the same one Biden had championed for years.
With this transformation, Biden has managed an unlikely feat: He has been just as wrong about Iraq this time around as he was in 1991. Though Biden maintained that the surge would fail (“Sending additional troops to Baghdad will place more Americans in harm’s way with little prospect for success”), even Obama today grudgingly concedes it has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
With similar gloom, Biden predicted the 2005 Iraqi elections were “going to be ugly,” marred by violence. Instead they went off smoothly. By late 2006, Biden concluded that Sunni-dominated Anbar province had “morphed into an indigenous jihadist movement” and that “no number of troops can solve the sectarian problem and we don’t have enough troops to definitively deal with the jihadist threat.” In reality, the jihadist movement was not indigenous and, bolstered by the surge’s modest increase in U.S. forces, Anbaris rejected al-Qaeda. Anbar is now one of the war’s greatest triumphs: The enemy has been vanquished and control of the province has just been turned over to the Iraqi government.
These developments underscore the folly of Biden’s ballyhooed 2006 proposal for a soft partition of Iraq into a loose federation of three ethno-sectarian enclaves. Now rendered irrelevant by events, the gambit — premised on an ill-conceived understanding of Iraq’s demographics and a disregard for its constitution — promised a chaotic descent into civil war, massive population displacements, and the possibility of luring Turkey and Saudi Arabia into a conflict that already includes Iran and Syria. Biden’s plan did succeed, however, in uniting Iraqis: Revulsion for the proposal cut across the ethno-sectarian divide.
And now, the dénouement. Well into 2005, Biden pronounced that timetables for a U.S. withdrawal would be a “gigantic mistake.” The imposition of arbitrary deadlines, Biden assured his fellow experts at the Brookings Institution, would “encourage our enemies to wait us out,” cause Iraq to “degenerate quickly in the sectarian violence,” and result in a debacle reminiscent of “Lebanon in 1985, and God knows where it goes from there.” But — surprise! — Biden then had another epiphany. He now sees the wisdom of withdrawal timelines, such as those urged by his running mate, whom he previously dismissed as too green for the heady arena of foreign affairs.
Playing politics with national and global security...this is foreign policy experience we need right now? I think not.
