Weekly Standard on Joe Biden: Least Powerful Vice President?
TWS:
Cheney’s role, real and imagined, in managing U.S. policy in Iraq earned him the title of most powerful vice president in U.S. history. Now his successor, Joe Biden, has been officially handed handed the Iraq portfolio and with it responsibility for a theater of operations that is host to two to three times as many U.S. troops as Afghanistan. Yet no one imagines him to be a particularly powerful vice president. If anything, Biden taking the “lead role” in Iraq only seems to confirm that this administration is about as concerned with events in that country as it is with preventing fraud in the stimulus spending — one of Biden’s other responsibilities.
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Tags: .S. policy in Iraq
July 4th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
When it comes to the possession of impeccable and unimpeachable foreign policy and national security credentials and sound foreign policy judgement and having the capacity for sharing wise and authoritative advice with the President they serve, Joe Biden and Dick Cheney occupy positions at opposite ends of the spectrum. In fact, they may as well live in parallel universes for the amount of daylight that exists between their respective world views - and that goes, most especially, for US policy in Iraq.
Unfortunately, for the national security of the US and for US policy in Iraq, the former Vice President must be considered the most dangerous man to hold that high office.
We can all be thankful that VP Biden has a leading role in shaping US policy in Iraq and in promoting and facilitating a sustainable political settlement in Iraq that will allow for the withdrawal of US forces without leaving a failed and fragmented state in their wake.