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*The hidden hand of Joe Biden*
By: Glenn Thrush
July 2, 2010 04:27 AM EDT

When President Barack Obama announced in the Rose Garden last week that he
had sacked Gen. Stanley
McChrystal<http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/stanleymcchrystal>,
he also made a point of telling his fractious Afghanistan team that he
welcomed “debate” but would not abide “division.”

The poster child for that all-for-one approach was standing directly on the
president’s right: Vice President Joe
Biden<http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/joebiden>
.

On Afghanistan, Obama’s most problematic foreign policy issue, Biden has
earned the president’s respect and confidence by being both private skeptic
and public cheerleader for administration policy. With a combination of
subtlety and discretion that belie his reputation as a glad-handing
chatterbox, Biden has parlayed the tricky dual role into a steady — if
somewhat improbable — path to power in the Obama White House.

“He’s a total team player,” says White House chief of staff Rahm
Emanuel<http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/rahmemanuel>,
the member of Obama’s inner circle who has most forcefully pushed the idea
of expanding Biden’s role as a foreign affairs troubleshooter.

“His job is to help the president to weigh these competing equities. There’s
not good and bad choices here; it’s all these complexities, and he helps him
think through all these equities,” Emanuel said.

The sudden firing of McChrystal — whose staff, according to Rolling
Stone<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/39254.html>,
nicknamed Biden “Joe Bite Me” — marked another milestone in the role Biden
has embraced as what he calls “the skunk at the family picnic.”

Biden joined other top advisers in the Oval Office on the morning of
McChrystal’s forced retirement for the final debate over McChrystal’s fate.
He also was one of the first to suggest Gen. David
Petraeus<http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/davidpetraeus> as
McChrystal’s replacement, despite occasional clashes with the general over
Afghanistan and Iraq war policy, according to a senior administration
official.

Later that day, Biden pulled Petraeus aside after a meeting Obama convened
in the White House Situation Room to say that he was “100 percent” behind
the new Afghanistan commander and the counterinsurgency approach he
initially questioned last fall.

Biden then suggested that the two have dinner. Could Petraeus come to
Wilmington that weekend? No, the general said. But when he heard Biden
planned to travel to Pensacola for an inspection tour of the Gulf oil spill,
he invited the vice president to Tampa, which, until this week, was his home
base as head of the U.S. Central Command.

Tuesday night, hours after his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed
Services Committee<http://topics.politico.com/index.cfm/topic/senatearmedservicescommittee>
in
Washington, Petraeus served Biden and his aide Tony Blinken sea bass,
cucumber soup, Florida salad and banana flambé during a genteel, mostly
social dinner that concluded with a tour of the general’s library.

No heavy discussion, a person familiar with the meeting told POLITICO — just
a general conversation about the sacrifices being made by the troops and
their families.

Biden’s theme: We’re all on the same page.

But the gestures masked a more complex reality. Last fall, as Petraeus and
McChrystal were pushing for an increase of as many as 80,000 U.S. troops in
Afghanistan, Biden proposed an alternative strategy that focused on hunting
Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with far fewer troops. And
while supporting Obama’s eventual decision to deploy more troops, Biden
apparently remains deeply skeptical that President Hamid Karzai can ever run
a functional state.

Obama, who has mandated the start of troop withdrawal in July 2011, has
quietly encouraged his vice president to challenge existing assumptions
about the war, even if it means rattling the military and the
administration’s own officials.

“That’s what the president wants, and if he didn’t want [Biden] to do it,
he’d shut it off,” Emanuel said.

Having Biden around is critical for Obama, a relative novice on foreign
policy who was in high school when Biden was clambering up the seniority
ladder on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Biden’s the voice of experience in the White House on this stuff,” said
Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who
once co-authored a plan with Biden to divide Iraq into three ethnically
based federal districts.

“Biden’s got far more experience than all of them over there in the White
House put together — and experience is more important than intellect on
foreign policy. For all his Biden-isms — and they are inevitable with Joe —
he knows this business, and people can’t dismiss him very easily.”

Petraeus, whose reputation rests on the success of the Iraq surge, “didn’t
like” the Biden-Gelb plan when it was proposed a few years ago, according to
Gelb. But reports of a Petraeus-Biden clash are overplayed, he added, and
the vice president is willing to give the general time to make his
Afghanistan plan work before passing judgment.

Other rifts within the administration’s Afghanistan team are more
pronounced, most notably the split between Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and
State Department envoy Richard Holbrooke — the intended recipients of
Obama’s get-along-or-else message in the Rose Garden.

In the past, Emanuel — whose office sits near Biden’s in the West Wing — has
asked Biden to go on quiet peacekeeping missions to defuse such conflicts.
Last year, for example, Biden went to Baghdad to help mediate a simmering
dispute between the top Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, and Ambassador
Christopher Hill, according to administration officials.

That, in turn, has led to an ever-expanding role on Iraq. With the help of
Blinken, a former aide from his days as Foreign Relations Committee
chairman, Biden runs the administration’s monthly meeting on Iraq. He
frequently confers with a variety of experts on the conflict, including
former Ambassador Ryan Crocker and former Bush aide Meghan O’Sullivan, and
sits down for breakfast with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, although
their schedules often get in the way.

Administration officials say Biden’s influence rivals Clinton’s on foreign
policy issues in part because he’s learned to play by Obama’s rules: Be
loyal and discreet.

“He’s not off the leash,” says an official who has worked closely with
Biden.

But, alas, this is still Joe Biden, who regards the imperative of
self-expression as second only to breathing and who can still annoy Obama
with his off-script public ramblings and tendency to bloviate at big White
House meetings.

Obama’s aides had to scramble recently when Jonathan Alter, in a new book on
Obama’s first year in office, cited Biden as saying that a significant
number of troops would begin leaving Afghanistan when the July 2011 target
date arrives.

“Bet on it,” Biden said.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs questioned the context of the statement,
Defense Secretary Robert Gates doubted its veracity, and Obama was forced to
tell reporters he had no intention of “turning out the lights” in the region
when the date arrived.

But more often than not, the White House has been able to leverage Biden’s
skepticism to its advantage, especially when it comes to pushing back
against the Pentagon’s efforts to pressure the president into accepting a
more open-ended military commitment.

Last fall, when word leaked that McChrystal would request as many as 80,000
new troops for a stepped-up counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, someone
in the administration responded with a strategic counterleak: Biden was
pushing for a scaled-down surge, accompanied by an accelerated effort to
combat Al Qaeda with drones and troops along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border.

That leak publicly established Biden’s role as what a senior administration
official calls “the in-house skeptic.”

Several officials told POLITICO the leak didn’t come from Biden’s office but
from someone in the White House who wanted to make it clear that the
McChrystal plan — backed by his boss Petraeus — was too radical. “It was a
train headed 80 miles an hour, and it needed to be slowed down,” one
official said.

Obama eventually opted for a middle path in a speech last December at West
Point, when he announced a surge of about 40,000 troops, renewed
counterinsurgency efforts against the Taliban and a new timetable for
withdrawal.

The decision was portrayed as a defeat for Biden. But if Petraeus is unable
to show significantly more progress than McChrystal did, many observers
believe that Obama’s only choice will be to adopt some form of Biden’s
scaled-down strategy.

In other words, “Joe Bite Me” may bite back.

“He’s now a major player,” says Steven Clemons, a foreign policy expert at
the nonpartisan New America Foundation. “The proof of his influence is the
level of disdain he generated in the McChrystal camp.”
--
Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.co