Wrong-Way Biden

Joe Biden is a proud retail politician, a man who believes the personal touch is how elected officials cement a connection with us. So I’ll share my personal story about how he cemented a connection with me, back when I and a few hundred thousand other troops were preparing for war, and Joe wafted in to warn us we were all to get our collective ass kicked.

In January of 1991, I was a second lieutenant in the 178th Personnel Service Company, an administrative appendix to the buffed body of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. My troops and I had landed in the Gulf town of Dhahran a week before Christmas and gradually made our way inland by long, grim, nearly silent convoys — creeping, 20-mph slogs across the one two-lane highway, then off the road and across the sands to set up camp.

In mid January, after maybe twelve hours of deliberate, dusty driving, I climbed out of a deuce-and-a-half and stretched my limbs as the soldiers began unloading, somewhere beneath the triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. A radio was playing in someone’s truck. Radio options were limited in this landscape; occasionally you could find the signal for the Armed Forces Network, if there was a large enough base nearby, but sometimes you couldn’t. AFN, Stars and Stripes, and occasional copies of a surprisingly good English-language broadsheet called “Arab News” were our sole media diet apart from whatever magazines we subscribed to, which would arrive weeks late in the mail. All three of our main sources were, of course, pro-U.S., which was fine by me. I had no idea what we were in for. I wanted only the most optimistic spin on things.

Which is why it was so startling to hear an American voice raining hellfire warnings on us over the radio. At first I assumed I was hearing AFN, but AFN didn’t let speeches go on like this uninterrupted, except maybe presidential addresses, and was strongly averse to downbeat messages. It dawned on me that we were listening to a mischievous enemy radio station that was blasting out unnerving propaganda to sap our morale like Tokyo Rose. Except the speaker hitting Saddam’s talking points was not a foreigner. It was Senator Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Tokyo Joe.

“What vital interest of the United States of America justifies sending young Americans to their death in the sands of the Arabian peninsula?” Biden asked, in his speech announcing his vote against the war resolution on January 12, 1991. “The appeasers of the past are now ready to vote to spill my son’s blood and his generation’s blood to satisfy and salve their consciences,” he declared. (I don’t know why he specified his son, as neither of his boys was in the military at the time; Beau eventually signed on, but that was twelve years later.) Biden gravely informed us that we did not enjoy America’s backing: “President Bush, . . . I implore you to understand that even if you win today, 46 to 54, you still lose. The Senate and the nation are divided on the issue. You have no mandate for war, Mr. President. . . . The impatience you feel, the anger you feel are all justified, but none of them add up to vital interest and none of them — none of them — justify the death of our sons and daughters.”

He called the proposed attack “dangerous folly.” He predicted it “could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives,” meaning U.S. ones. He predicted “loss of American international support in the future.” He asked, “Who do we think we are? What do we think of our capabilities to do what has seldom been done in history without total occupation of the entire region?”

War, you may have heard, can be a bit stressful under the best of circumstances. It’s a real downer when your own leaders stand up and call you chumps who are going to get mown down by the thousands. Advice for politicians: Make whatever case you feel is morally correct, but try not to go so far that you wind up starring in enemy propaganda.

The ground war turned out okay, and was over in 100 hours with a KIA total of about 140. I’m sure Biden was happy to be proven wrong, though if he ever said so, I missed it. Most would argue he was wrong again when he voted for the 2003 Iraq War, although in that case even as he voted yes he repeatedly warned about its consequences. If the invasion turned out to be a success he could claim he supported it, but if it went pear-shaped he could say, “I told you so.” He went on to vote against the 2007 surge that restored order after years of chaos, then put a cherry on top of it all when he advised President Obama not to carry out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (“Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go”). Then he put a cherry on top of the cherry when he lied about this: When asked, on January 3 of this year, “Didn’t you tell President Obama ‘Don’t go’ after bin Laden that day?” Biden replied, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t.” “Three Pinocchios,” declared the Washington Post.