At least as far as his adoring liberal admirers are concerned, former Vice President Joe Biden is on relatively firm ground when he sticks to domestic political issues. His crowd of voters still believes in the strength and goodness of Obamacare, still thinks that we’re experiencing a boom economy thanks to what the former president put in motion, and is generally willing to accept that President Obama is an unanointed saint. When Biden can steer the conversation towards those “successes,” he is on safe – if not sacred – ground.
But when the subject of the conversation turns to foreign policy, Biden is a man at sea without a sail.
This has been blindingly obvious over the last couple of weeks as Biden has been forced to confront the dominant news of the day: U.S. tensions with Iran. Perhaps because he believes that the mainstream media will cover for him, Biden has been predisposed to tell quite a few lies about his role in the Obama administration. Unfortunately for him, the media has proven to be exceptionally willing to call him out for his outright falsehoods, making him look silly and deceptive at the exact time he can scarcely afford it.
Last week, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Biden if he would be able to take an incoming piece of intelligence about an imminent attack on Americans and use that intelligence to call for the killing of a terrorist leader.
Biden took the obvious bait.
“Well, we did. Guy’s name was Osama bin Laden,” Biden said.
To which Doocy replied, “Didn’t you tell President Obama not to go after bin Laden?”
“No, I didn’t,” Biden lied. “I didn’t.”
But you did, Joe, and even left-wing sites like Politico called you out for it. Among others, they recounted how, in 2012, Biden told Democratic lawmakers how Obama asked senior administration officials if he should authorize the raid on the Pakistan compound of Osama bin Laden.
“Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go,” Biden said, recalling his reaction. “‘We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.”
Biden has yet to share what these “two more things” were, but Obama obviously didn’t take his advice. Now, eight years later, we assume that Biden himself has forgotten what they were.
But that exchange with Doocy wasn’t Biden’s only foreign-policy lie this week.
Naturally, the idea that we might be headed for war with Iran has brought to mind the U.S. war in Iraq. Now, every politician on the left (and no small number on the right) wants to claim credit these days for knowing that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea. But it’s one thing to express regrets; it’s another to pretend that you voiced those concerns at the time.
This weekend, in response to a voter who chastised him for voting to authorize that war, Biden insisted that he was against the war “from the very moment” the bombs started dropping on Baghdad. Now, putting aside the fact that this realization would already fall into the category of a day late and a dollar short, the fact remains that Biden was on CNN the day the strikes started.
He didn’t sound like he was opposed to the action.
“We have one single focus,” Biden said at the time. “And that is, we’re about to send our women and men to war. The president is the commander-in-chief. We voted to give him the authority to wage that war. We should step back and be supportive.”
For as much as the media likes to call Trump out as “reckless” and “impulsive,” the one thing he is not is indecisive. Biden’s flip-flopping approach to past decisions tells us that he’ll bring a similar sensibility to the role of commander-in-chief. That’s not the kind of leadership this country needs.
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