Biden hadn't wanted a specific portfolio of his own, but the president gave him one. At an NSC meeting in June, 2009, he turned to Biden and said, "Joe, you do Iraq." (Biden had been deeply involved in Iraq as a senator, and had once proposed a partition plan for the country from which he later backed away.) Biden has made seven trips to Iraq since Obama's directive. It is a job tailor-made for a career politician who loves plotting strategy, brokering compromise, talking about the wife and kids, squeezing a shoulder, an arm, a knee, or any other body part that hoves into view. Biden still spends a quarter or so of his time trying to prod Iraq's endlessly bickering Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish leaders into working with each other rather than trying to kill each other. Exactly how successful he's been is a matter of dispute. A recent report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies concludes that as tensions rise among competing ethnic blocs, "a political crisis seems likely if not inevitable." Cordesman also notes that the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011 has both sharply reduced American influence and increased sometimes lethal political jockeying. On the other hand, as Blinken points out, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his chief rivals are still competing through politics, not gunfire.
Beyond Iraq, Biden has assigned himself a distinctive role, one that could not be more different from Cheney's. "The president shouldn't be the one to turn over the apple cart," Biden told me in the course of one of our long and numerous conversations in 2009, "but I think it's much in his interest that the apple cart be turned over." Biden has specialized in disrupting groupthink and in forcing Obama's most senior advisors to examine the consequences of their proposed choices. The most famous example, of course, was the agonizingly protracted 2009 debate over strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the reasons it took so long is that Biden kept questioning the argument advanced by David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, then the military overseers of the Afghan war, for a major counterinsurgency campaign with 40,000 additional soldiers and a large-scale civilian component.
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward has since reported, in Obama's War, that from the outset of the debate in March, Biden argued for a much more modest counterterrorism effort focused on degrading al Qaeda in Pakistan rather than defeating the Taliban in Pakistan. Woodward quotes the late envoy Richard Holbrooke comparing Biden's role to that of George Ball, Lyndon Johnson's under secretary of state, who persistently questioned the logic of escalation in Vietnam. I was talking to Biden throughout this period, and at one point he said to me, "You're going to be angry with me, because I'm not going to talk much about Afghanistan because I want the president to hear what I have to say." He then spent 13 minutes talking, off the record, about Afghanistan, and returned to the subject at much greater length later on.
Biden's office declined my request to put some of those remarks on the record, so I will just say that what Biden told me confirmed Woodward's account of his views: that counterinsurgency wouldn't work owing to the corruption and incompetence of Afghanistan's government; that the strategy wasn't necessary because al Qaeda was unlikely to return to Afghanistan even in the case of a Taliban victory; and that the real focus of the effort should be Pakistan rather than Afghanistan. The president encouraged Biden to challenge Petraeus and McChrystal; but in the end Obama was unwilling to reject their plan, though it seems clear that he shared many of Biden's doubts. Obama authorized a civil-military strategy with 30,000 additional troops. The White House continues to present its Afghanistan strategy as a success, though even many of Obama's supporters in the foreign-policy community regard it as his worst decision. In exchange for a vast investment of blood and treasure, the United States has made military gains that may prove transitory, has trained troops still unable to act on their own, and has watched helplessly as Afghan President Hamid Karzai has protected corrupt and brutal figures. The United States has crippled al Qaeda -- but through the counterterrorism tactics Biden had proposed. Obama must wonder if he would have been better off listening to his vice president, as LBJ must have felt about George Ball.
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