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Iraq, Afghanistan and Joe Biden’s Foreign-Policy Record


Vice President Joe Biden in Kiev, Ukraine, this spring.
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Among the surprising things in Robert Gates’s memoir was this comment about Joseph Biden, in a paragraph that begins with warm words about the former defense secretary’s feelings toward the vice president:

“Still, I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Some of that harsh indictment probably stemmed from frustration with Mr. Biden’s skepticism of the administration’s Afghanistan policy. But that is no justification for such a sweeping condemnation.

Another issue has occupied the United States for much of the four decades that Mr. Gates and Mr. Biden have so doggedly served the nation: Iraq. Even though Mr. Biden adamantly refused to acknowledge the success of the surge in 2007-08, his role on Iraq has been exemplary at times.

Consider three key moments: In the summer of 2002, then-Sen. Biden held a series of Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the likely challenges of stabilizing post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. These wound up being by far and away the most prescient set of high-level discussions anywhere on the likely difficulty of a war to unseat Iraq’s dictator. Had the U.S. military heeded more of the wisdom aired in those hearings, the United States might have been much better prepared, assuming the administration still chose to wage war.

In 2006, as Iraq trended toward all-out civil war, Mr. Biden and Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations developed a plan for Bosnia-style “federalism”—that is, the soft partition of Iraq into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish areas (an autonomous Kurdistan already existed). For those who had turned against the war, this was a far more responsible approach than cutting and running, as many implicitly favored at the time. This is a classic example of how the “loyal opposition” can responsibly help the nation even when no longer able to support administration policy. It provided an option the U.S. might well have needed—and, given where things appear headed, that Iraqis may yet need to consider.

Once in the White House, Mr. Biden did yeoman’s work in helping midwife the Iraqis to and through the 2010 parliamentary elections and in managing the U.S. military departure. He visited Iraq several times, a rather thankless task in an administration led by a president who opposed the war from the start. Mr. Biden did it with aplomb and without complaint.

Based on the Iraq experience, Mr. Gates’s comments are unfair and uncharacteristic. Mr. Biden may not be his favorite guy, but he deserves better than he received in this memoir.

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the 21st Century.”

Think Tank is Capital Journal’s home for outside analysis from policy and political thinkers.

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Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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