Biden Has it right…so says Newsweek
My guess is joe gets his ideas from Delaware Liberal.
April 26, 2007 – For a guy whose presidential campaign was declared dead almost the day it started, Joe Biden sounds a bit too confident these days. Especially when it comes to Iraq. “If it were up to us,” says Larry Rasky, Biden’s chief campaign flack, “all 90 minutes” of Thursday night’s inaugural debate between the eight Democratic candidates would have been devoted to the subject of Iraq. Why? Because the six-term senator from Delaware is “the only one with a comprehensive plan for getting us out of Iraq without leaving chaos behind,” says Rasky.
Of course his spokesman would say that. But in this case, Rasky has a point. When it comes to staking out clear, convincing positions on Iraq, the rest of the Democratic race resembles a bad day at the Demolition Derby. Even the golden-tongued Barack Obama, while waxing eloquent about the global leadership vacuum left by George W. Bush, had little to say about Iraq the other day in his first big foreign-policy campaign speech. (Obama reiterated his call for “a phased withdrawal of American forces with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31st, 2008,” without saying what would be left behind.) Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and others back the Democratic-sponsored legislation that also calls for a withdrawal deadline. That bill passed the House and Senate this week largely along partisan lines, but almost every politico in Washington believes that, after Bush vetoes it next week, the Dems will ultimately sign onto a relatively open-ended spending authorization—in effect, giving the president what he wants. On the Republican side, the two fron runners, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, are both trying to out-Bush Bush—tying the war on terror to “victory” in Iraq—while Mitt Romney has been hard to pin down to a firm position.
Biden, on the other hand, has been on the record for a year with a fully thought-out vision for Iraq that offers a real alternative to the bleak choice we’re getting from everyone else. Let’s face it, the “debate” pits the Bush administration’s model-democracy delusion against the Democrats’ let’s-just-get-out state of denial. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee—far and away the most experienced foreign-policy hand among the Democratic candidates—has proposed a quasi-partition plan that actually does reflect the bloody reality emerging on the ground. His scheme calls for dividing Iraq into three or more separate regions held together by a loose central government, thus clearing the way for withdrawing most U.S. troops by 2008. It’s a solution, not a surrender, and it’s what they used to call realpolitik.
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