NYT Mag: After Cheney

[babylonsister]

After Cheney

Antonio Bolfo for The New York Times

Joe Biden at the Capitol Building.


By JAMES TRAUB
Published: November 24, 2009

Antonio Bolfo for The New York Times

THE MEDIATOR So far, Biden has avoided the White House infighting that marked Cheney’s tenure.


When Vice President Biden travels to Iraq, which he does every two months or so, he flies on Air Force Two to an airbase in southern England and then transfers to a cargo plane, a C-17, retrofitted for vice-presidential comfort with an Airstream trailer bolted on to tracks in the center of the hold. With its porthole and shiny rivets and gleaming chrome, this strange conveyance looks like something out of Jules Verne. Captain Biden holds court in a wood-paneled galley just large enough for his half-dozen or so aides to pile into. Unlike Nemo, he is a gregarious knee-squeezer who has to be ordered by his staff to stop talking so he can get some rest.

I had the first of several long conversations with Biden in the Airstream this summer on his return from his first trip to Iraq as vice president. With violence much reduced and some signs of political reconciliation, Iraq had suddenly switched places with Afghanistan to become the war we ignore; but Obama-administration officials feared that Iraq would sink back into fratricide unless Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds made the painful compromises they had avoided so far. President Obama had committed to ending America’s combat role in the country by Aug. 31, 2010; though both the American and Iraqi publics demanded the withdrawal, it endangered Iraq’s very fragile security and reduced American leverage at a crucial moment of political transition. Early last June, the president asked Biden to take responsibility for Iraq.

During the course of a two-day trip to Baghdad, Biden met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other leading political figures. Officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations had come to view Maliki as a sectarian Shiite bent on marginalizing Iraq’s Sunni minority. “You’ve never heard me prior to this trip singing the praises of Maliki,” Biden said. He had changed into his Airstream mufti — short-sleeve knit shirt and natty dark slacks. He is impressively trim for a 67-year-old, especially one scarcely known for self-discipline.

Biden said he had been having second thoughts about Maliki. In March of last year, the prime minister sent troops to suppress the forces of Moktada al-Sadr and the militias that controlled the southern city of Basra — Shiites in both cases. He had alienated parts of his base and launched an appeal across sectarian lines. “He’s got a real problem,” Biden said, following this new train of thought, “and if he wants to stay in power” — an election is looming next year — “how does he do it?” He needed to assemble a winning coalition. Would he seek Kurdish support? Sunni support? Both? But how, given that the Kurds and Sunnis were at each other’s throats? “These guys put their pants on one leg at a time,” Biden said. “They’re still politicians.”

Here was a Joe Biden guiding principle. Unlike Obama, Biden has spent virtually his entire life in politics. It is his medium: he talks about world leaders the way a grizzled baseball coach talks about the opposing lineup. I once heard him say, “Foreign policy is like human relations, only people know less about each other.” One of the chief reasons that Obama has sought Biden’s advice on a range of pressing foreign-policy questions — most notably, in recent months, on policy in Afghanistan — is that Biden has a deep knowledge of, and an intuitive feel for, people and places still new to the president. He appears to have judged right on Iraq, where the coming elections should constitute a major success both for the Iraqis and for the Obama administration. But that’s only if they actually occur. Iraqi leaders may still choose sectarian over national interest no matter the consequences — and they’ve shown signs of doing just that. Politics are not, alas, the same all over.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29Biden-t.html

[gateley]

1. Great article, very well done. The author acknowledges Joe's accomplishments

and talents, and notes the negatives as well. Even handed. Thanks! :hi:

Edit to add, I found the info regarding the behind the scenes stuff (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.) really interesting and educational.

[PatSeg]

5. This is an excellent article

The writer was just on MSNBC and I think the article will be featured off and on all day on the news.

[PatSeg]

7. Kick for those who missed it earlier

[yellerpup]

2. Good to hear.

Thanks for highlighting our worthy VP. K&R!

[flpoljunkie]

3. Recommended. A good read.

[Cha]

4. This is really satisfying to read about VP Joe Biden's

accomplishments!

[jillan]

6. That was an exceptional read - all 8 pages of it.

Very interesting to read about the back and forth that Biden has been involved in with world leaders.

I love that guy.

[elleng]

8. GREAT article! I'm in the middle. Should post 'up front.'

'At a national-security meeting in early June, where discussion centered on the potential dangers of the impending drawdown of troops, Obama turned to Biden and said, as Biden recalls, “Joe, you do Iraq.” Biden says he was so surprised that at first he thought the president was kidding. In fact, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, says it was his idea. “I’ve known the vice president for a long time,” Emanuel told me. “He has everything — gravitas, political smarts, the confidence of the players and knowledge of the issues. At the end of the day, this is a political process, and you need a politician to work on the process. And he has the authority of the White House.”'

[Hekate]

9. Kick for Joe Biden, an impressive Veep if there ever was one.

:toast:

[elleng]

10. # 8 cont'd

There is a view that Obama’s team is divided between what Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation and The Washington Note, a leading foreign-policy blog, calls “progressive realists” like James Steinberg and “Democratic neocons” — that is, moralists — like Susan E. Rice, the ambassador to the U.N. The hard-headed Biden, Clemons says, “can play in both those games.” But this classification scheme explains only so much. It may be more useful to say that this president is pulled both toward the grand project — as in the campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons — and toward the chastened recalibration, as evident in the reined-in language on democracy promotion. The tension falls between the extreme ambitiousness of the goals and the caution required to achieve them — a sense of prudence born in no small part of the failure of George W. Bush’s transformative schemes.

VI.

IT IS PRECISELY this tension that has made the debate over Afghanistan so prolonged and difficult. The president called Afghanistan “a war of necessity” as recently as August. Iraq was George W. Bush’s war of necessity; and for Bush that meant authorizing the war and worrying about the consequences later — or perhaps closing his eyes to the consequences. But Obama and his circle of advisers have been bedeviled by doubts about whether the ambitious nationwide counterinsurgency program proposed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and David Petraeus, head of Central Command, can actually work. And here Biden’s hard-earned skepticism, his knowledge of the region, his zest for verbal combat and the trust that Obama now reposes in him have allowed him to play a major role in recasting the terms of debate. . .

When I asked Rahm Emanuel about Biden’s role in the discussions, he said: “People were thinking about certain things, but hadn’t expressed them. The vice president was expressing them.”

[tonysam]

11. That was an excellent piece about Joe Biden

I have always admired him.