A Joe Biden With Balls

Almost no one remembers Adlai Stevenson. He was the Democratic nominee for president two times, in 1952 and 1956. He was liberal, intellectual, cultured, erudite and brilliant. He badly lost both elections to Dwight Eisenhower, who was simple, solid and dull. Joseph Alsop, the then-famous journalist and Cold War liberal, was not a fan of Stevenson. When, after disappointed with Adlai’s losses, Alsop heard up-and-comer John Kennedy speak, he gushed, "At last, a Stevenson with balls."

I’ve been thinking about Joe Biden lately, the Democratic senator from Delaware and soon-to-be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Joe Biden makes me think of Adlai Stevenson. Why? Because he’s no Jack Kennedy. Joe Biden may be the only highly placed politician in Washington who is making sense when it comes to Iraq, but Jack Kennedy he ain’t.

Conservatives have lost all credibility regarding Iraq. They’ve been fighting a rear guard action against reality, but even the modern conservative movement, a movement which has mastered the art of willful self-delusion, cannot hold back reality forever. There is some comfort in the knowledge that even conservatives eventually have to deal with the real world. That, of course, is the real point of the last election. Does anyone – anyone?! – still think that Iraq can be made stable, unified and democratic? Isn’t it finally clear to everyone that the social conditions in Iraq are just plain hostile to stability, unity and democracy? Now that the Iraqi Civil War is starting in earnest, things are so bad that even the Bush administration is beginning to take notice.

And what are the Democratic alternatives? For the most part they’re various versions of bringing the boys back home, the only differences being the timetables and troop strengths. Does anyone really think this is a good idea? Isn’t it clear that an abandoned Iraq will descend into full scale civil war? It would become the sort of breeding ground and training camp for terrorists that Saddam’s Iraq never remotely was. It would be a disaster, a disaster which Republicans and Democrats would both be responsible for.

There is, of course, a lot of buzz surrounding James Baker’s Iraq Study Group and its recommendations, one of which is to get help from Syria and Iran, not exactly countries we would want to have more influence in Iraq and in the region. This is not exactly a happy outcome either. But it is marginally better than either staying the course or cutting and running. The group’s other proposal is that American forces withdraw to Iraqi strongholds, islands in a sea of chaos and civil war. This is a plan that tries to have it both ways, it stays the course and cuts and runs all at the same time. Thus Bush can claim to be keeping Iraq intact while reducing American casualties. This is politics masquerading as foreign policy.

And then there’s Joe Biden, who for the last few months has been pushing a plan for Iraq that may actually be workable and whose outcome may actually be tolerable. It allows each of the three major ethnic groups, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, almost complete autonomy within their respective areas, with rules for sharing the national resources, like oil. There would still be a national government, but it would have almost no real power. Think of it as partition lite. If the three groups could be brought together to negotiate such a settlement and an international army could patrol the borders there might actually be peace. What makes Biden’s plan so appealing is that it consists of neither pig-headed stubbornness nor irresponsible abandonment. It is a plan that recognizes that you can’t have a military solution unless you have a political solution. It is, in a word, a wise plan.

Bosnia adopted a very similar plan in 1995 and it has basically worked. The three ethnic groups there, Serbs, Croats and Muslims hammered out an agreement they all could live with. American and European troops have been keeping the peace there since. Guess how many of those troops have been killed there in the last 11 years. That’s right, none. Bosnia as a unified country is a fiction, but it’s a peaceful fiction.

But it doesn’t seem like a plan as reasonable as Biden’s has much chance given the political mood in Washington these days. Particularly since Biden himself doesn't have a lot of credibility. Why not? Because he voted for the Iraq War back in 2003 and he hasn’t exactly earned any glory for political courage since. He only recently recanted that vote. Before that his courage was sufficient to merely criticize the conduct of the war. It’s clear that Joe Biden never really supported the war, even when he voted for it. So why did he vote for it? Because he’s no Jack Kennedy. He had the wisdom to see the war was a mistake but he lacked the courage to vote against it. He decided that appearing strong was more important than being strong. And many other leading Democrats made the same cynical calculation. Now Joe Biden is wiser than most politicians in Washington and he almost certainly will do some good as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, but he’s not the sort of man who can lead his party or his country out of the wilderness.

George Bush has the courage of his convictions, but that’s all he has. What good is it to stick to your convictions when your convictions are dead wrong? Joe Biden has good ideas but insufficient courage. What good are good ideas if you don’t have the courage to stand up for them? It may not seem fair to compare one of the best Democrats to one of the worst Republicans, but consider that each is symptomatic of his party’s flaws. The cliché has it that Republicans believe in the wrong things and Democrats don’t believe in anything. Republican foolishness has caused them to fail as the party in charge and Democratic cowardice has caused them to fail as the party in opposition. Where are we as a country to turn? What we desperately need is a Democrat with courage and strength. What we need is a Joe Biden with balls.