CANDIDATE SERIES: Biden Speaks Truth to Power
01 September 2007 6:05 am by Taylor Marsh
TM Note: I chose several campaigns, then asked one simple question: Would
you like to guest post on my blog? Frankly, it takes a lot to back a
candidate. So I wanted to hear the online team make their case. What will they
post? The Biden team was first out accepting the invitation, thus first to post.
The other campaigns can now read and learn. There were no rules or topic, though everyone who reads this blog knows what’s most important around here. Obama
and Edwards accepted immediately as well, then Dodd. I’m still waiting to confirm
details with camp Clinton, but I hope the campaign will post. You might think,
whoa, a commercial for a presidential candidate? Yawn. No doubt some
will still see it that way after reading all of them. But I wanted to ask a very
simple question of each campaign, then let them decide how to answer. What’s
their message? What did they say to you? What’s their campaign about? You’re
the critic. You tell me.
CANDIDATE SERIES: Biden Speaks Truth to Power
In Response to Bush’s Iraq Speech
Guest post from the Biden campaign for president
My name is Joel Meister, and I work in the Biden campaign’s online communications shop, where I post on the official campaign blog. I’d like to thank Taylor for the opportunity to post here today. I am very excited to see bloggers like Taylor and others providing the candidates with new ways to engage voters on the country’s most important issues.
Needless to say, Iraq is the #1 issue for most Americans. As our soldiers are caught in the middle of a civil war that is consuming Americans’ blood and treasure, President Bush continues to stubbornly cling to his failed policies and stick his head in the sand when faced with the reality that things are not working. Just this week, Bush spoke to the American Legion Convention to drum up support for the war in advance of General Petraeus’s progress report in September. While campaigning in Iowa, Senator Joe Biden held a press conference in Davenport to speak out against the President’s conflations about Iraq and America’s national security, providing a stark contrast to those who would concede progress is being made in Iraq.
Mike Glover has the story for the Associated Press:
Democrat Joe Biden charged Tuesday that President Bush’s policies in Iraq are designed to confuse voters and ensure that a chaotic end to the war is delayed until after he leaves office. Biden pointed to the turmoil that accompanied the end of the Vietnam War, with Americans plucked from the roof of the U.S. Embassy as enemy troops poured into Saigon. He said Bush wants to avoid such a stain on the end of his presidency.
From the full text of Senator Biden’s prepared remarks:
“We’ll be hearing a lot about the “surge” over the next several weeks, but remember its purpose: to buy time for the central government in Iraq to get its act together and win the trust of all Iraqis. “That will not happen.
“Absent an occupation which we cannot sustain or the return of a dictator which we cannot support; Iraq cannot be governed from the center at this point in its history. There is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people, no capacity by the government to deliver security and services, and no prospect it will build that trust and capacity any time soon.
Glover:
Biden, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Congress will launch hearings on the Iraq war the first week it’s back in session. He rejected Bush’s assertion that an increase in the number of troops has improved the situation in Iraq.
Biden further argued that our focus on Iraq has taken our eye off the ball:
“Today, the President argued that we have to stay in Iraq to fight extremists. But the fact is his misguided and mismanaged war has fueled extremists in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Last month, the intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate on “The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland.” It was a devastating indictment of the Administration’s failure to accomplish its most important mission: destroying Al Qaeda and the threat it poses. “The Al Qaeda we failed to finish off in Afghanistan and Pakistan because we went into Iraq has “regenerated.” It remains intent on attacking us at home. That should have put to rest once and for all the false refrain President Bush keeps repeating that ‘we’re fighting them over there in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here.’
“That same NIE spotlighted the danger posed by “Al Qaeda in Iraq,” a group independent of, but now affiliated with Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. The President likes to confuse the American people by conflating “Al Qaeda in Iraq” with the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. They are not one and the same. In fact, “Al Qaeda in Iraq” did not exist before we went into Iraq – it is a Bush-fulfilling prophecy.
Ultimately, Biden’s speech Tuesday afternoon crystallized what many critics of the Bush Administration often ignore: Bush’s policies in Iraq are fundamentally flawed due to the Administration’s underlying assumption that a strong central government can successfully take shape in a post-Saddam Iraq. Republicans like John Warner now publicly admit that the Maliki government has failed to overcome the sectarian conflict that is claiming lives on all sides.
Senator Biden was voicing that concern over a year ago when he co-authored an op-ed in the New York Times with Les Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations:
Iraq’s new government of national unity will not stop the deterioration. Iraqis have had three such governments in the last three years, each with Sunnis in key posts, without noticeable effect.
One year later in Davenport, Biden said recent evidence confirms their assessment of the situation in Iraq:
Back in November, CIA director Michael Hayden made this very point in a private meeting with the Iraq Study Group. He said “the inability of the [central] government to govern is irreversible.” There is no “milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around,” he said. “We have spent a lot of energy and treasure creating a government… that cannot function.” “Last week, our entire intelligence community came to the same conclusion. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq found that “Iraqi political leaders remain unable to govern effectively” and predicted that “the Iraqi government will become more precarious over the next six to twelve months.”
But instead of just joining the chorus of critics of the Bush Administration, Biden went one step further to answer Bush’s failures with a real plan for a political solution in Iraq, re-affirming what Biden and Gelb prescribed in the New York Times op-ed:
“I have a plan that offers the possibility, not the guarantee, of promoting stability in Iraq as we leave. It’s based on the reality that Iraq cannot be governed from the center. Instead, we have to give its warring factions breathing room in their own regions, with control over the fabric of their daily lives – police, education, jobs, marriage, religion. “A limited central government would be in charge of truly common concerns, including protecting Iraq’s borders and distributing oil revenues. More and more of my Democratic colleagues now agree that what I’m proposing may be the best possible outcome in Iraq – but they don’t want to impose it on the Iraqis.
“The good news is: we don’t have to. The federal system at the heart of my plan is already in Iraq’s constitution and in its laws. We should refocus our efforts on making federalism work for all Iraqis. I’d initiate a diplomatic offensive to do just that, bringing in the U.N., major countries and Iraq’s neighbors to help implement and oversee the political settlement I’m proposing. “It is past time to make Iraq’s the world’s problem, not just our own.”
On the campaign front, Senator Biden has been busy in Iowa, building support for his plan for Iraq and his candidacy for president. The campaign recently began airing two ads in Iowa, “Cathedral” and “Security,” which speak to the urgent need to end this war responsibly so that future generations of Americans don’t have to return to the region.
For a more detailed explanation of Senator Biden’s plan for Iraq, check out PlanForIraq.com. Probably the best discussion that I’ve seen regarding the plan took place on Charlie Rose just a few weeks ago. During an hour-long one-on-one discussion on life and politics, Rose and Biden go into the intricacies of the Biden-Gelb plan for federalism in Iraq, analyzing the pros and cons. It starts at about 27:42 in the video.
If only we got that kind of open and honest talk from the Bush Administration.
