In the summer of 2008, putting Joe Biden on the ticket was "Barack Obama's first decision."
He was praised by Democrats and the media for his brilliant and serious decision. Choosing Biden, it was alleged, would provide foreign policy gravitas to the campaign and, eventually, the Obama Administration.
But Biden's track record on foreign policy is terrible. Former Defense Secretary under Obama, Robert Gates,
summed it up rather nicely earlier this year.
The vice president, when he was a senator — a very new senator — voted against the aid package for South Vietnam, and that was part of the deal when we pulled out of South Vietnam to try and help them survive. He said that when the Shah fell in Iran in 1979 that that was a step forward for progress toward human rights in Iran. He opposed virtually every element of President Reagan's defense build-up. He voted against the B-1, the B-2, the MX and so on. He voted against the first Gulf War. So on a number of these major issues, I just frankly, over a long period of time, felt that he had been wrong."
The latest blistering assessment of Biden was yesterday by Ali Khedery -- the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq, acting as a special assistant to five U.S. ambassadors and as a senior adviser to three heads of U.S. Central Command.
Khedery
wrote extensively yesterday in the Washington Post how the U.S. decision to leave Iraq under Obama resulted in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki squandering all of the political and military gains since the American surge of troops. He meticulously describes how Maliki consolidated power, defied the vanishing U.S. influence, and turned a multi-party government into a one-man show by 2009.