Biden was hawkish on Bosnia after a trip there in 1993, co-sponsoring a bill that ultimately forced President Bill Clinton to take action in 1995 to stem the bloodshed of the Yugoslav Wars. And he supported Clinton’s bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 that helped give birth to the Albanian-majority nation. But he was skittish on George H.W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq, while supporting George W. Bush’s decision to invade a bit more than a decade later. By 2006, Biden had properly soured on that decision and was advocating an ill-conceived “Bosnia plan” for Iraq, a kind of federalist soft partition along ethnic lines.
He was arguing, like most Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2008, that Afghanistan was the good and winnable war, before he turned on it, too, as Obama’s vice president. This clearly made him some enemies in the Obama administration, many of whom are still sniping at him today. Some never forgave his early naivete. “I wish I could say Biden was a student of history and understood how problematic nation-building would be in Afghanistan,” an unidentified former top Obama Pentagon official told the Washington Post earlier this year. “That’s not Biden. He has gut instincts.” Others, such as the late Richard Holbrooke, were dismayed by Biden’s apparent callousness — especially when contrasted with his interventionist instincts in Bosnia. There’s a gripping exchange recorded in Holbrooke’s diaries that’s worth quoting at length:
When I mentioned the women’s issue, Biden erupted. Almost rising from his chair, he said, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights, it just won’t work, that’s not what they’re there for.” [. . .] He said it ain’t going to happen, he said I don’t understand politics, he said we’re facing a debacle politically, he said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam. This shocked me and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us. He said, “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Was it over when Richard Nixon bombed Pearl Harbor? Forget it — Joe’s rolling.
Earlier: Joe Biden comes full circle.
There’s something about seeing helicopters taking off from the rooftops of soon-to-be abandoned US embassies that Joe absolutely loves.
