Biden calls himself "the odd man out" among '08 Democrats

Sen. Joe Biden blasts his fellow Democratic presidential candidates, saying they need to "connect the dots" when it comes to Iraq, Iran and foreign policy.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Iran, Politics, News, Walter Shapiro, John Edwards, Iraq War, Barack Obama, 2008 election, Chris Dodd

Photos: AP/Paul Sancya

Joseph Biden speaks at the Farmer's Union summit in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Nov. 10, 2007.

Nov. 21, 2007 | DES MOINES, Iowa -- Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sat down with Salon over coffee at the Marriott Hotel here Monday morning for a 90-minute interview about foreign policy and the Democratic presidential race. According to Biden, when it comes to foreign policy, there's him, and then there's every other Democratic candidate. Below are excerpts from the interview:

This is the same question that I asked Barack Obama yesterday. What would you say to Democratic primary voters who don't want the next president to get us into a war with Iran?

The way to avoid a war with Iran -- and to avoid a really dangerous Iran 10 years from now -- is to figure out how to connect the dots. And one of the things that I find when I talk to my Democratic colleagues is that they view everything in isolation. As if you can have an Iranian policy that can succeed that has no bearing on the relationship with Russia, China, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And that is the part that I find so unsettling.

All the Democratic candidates talk about Iran now, but they don't talk about Iran in terms of the difficulty we're having now with the decline of the dollar and the rise of oil prices. They really don't connect it.

Take the recent vote on Kyl-Lieberman. [Kyl-Lieberman was a nonbinding Senate resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist organization. Hillary Clinton voted for it, but Biden and the other Democratic presidential candidates were opposed.] My argument against Kyl-Lieberman didn't go to the merits ... of whether or not the Revolutionary Guard was all bad or only some bad. And it didn't even rest upon the notion that [approving the resolution was] going to embolden Bush. It was just counterproductive. And it amazes me that the candidates with the money [Clinton, Obama and John Edwards] don't seem to get it ... This [vote] was going to cause the price of oil to skyrocket...

Guess what happened? Oil went up $30 a barrel. It's not all because of that, but at least 15 percent of the risk factor [is] related to Iran. So you have [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad with $25 billion last year -- at $50 a barrel for oil -- to do bad things. Now he's going to have $50 billion to do bad things.

[Among Iranians] you take the focus off the failure of Ahmadinejad's domestic policy and you unite the country under one thing -- the bad guys want to bomb us. People are sitting around Iran at a table saying, "Do you think [the Americans] want to attack us?" Do you want to unite the Iranian people who already don't like Ahmadinejad, who don't like the theocracy, [against the United States]?

What I don't get is that [the other Democratic candidates] think like Bush in terms of this linear view. It seems that a lot of the candidates don't understand is that this all plays into "This is a war on Islam." It has an impact in Pakistan. It has an impact in [Afghanistan] ... We're so conditioned in the Bush era [that we think] we can segregate completely foreign policy without it overflowing into other relationships...

So my answer to your question: I find stark differences not between the candidates but with myself being the odd man out. Two debates ago when I mentioned Pakistan, there were blank looks on everybody's face. Literally ... Some people looked at me like, "Where did that come from? Pakistan?"

... I keep telling myself that maybe my fellow Democrats are being politically smart, maybe they think it is too complicated to talk to the American people about. Or else they don't know what they're talking about. One of the two.

Which do you think it is: Do they not know what they're talking about? Or is it politically smart not to mention things like Pakistan?

I don't know. I really don't know. Richardson surprises me because I thought he knew a lot better. It doesn't surprise me that Barack -- this is complicated stuff, and you have to have a little time with it. Hillary, I just don't know.

If I hear you correctly, what you're saying is that -- besides who has the most experience -- the fault line among Democratic candidates is really, do you have a foreign policy? or do you have a series of individual positions about individual countries?

My observation is based on [everything from] private discussions that I have had off-the-cuff to what I've observed in their speeches to what I've heard in our joint appearances. There is a patina of a [Democratic] foreign policy that rests on "I'll negotiate and not go to war." That's about it. But when it gets beyond that, into, what is your foreign policy? what is the essence of it? what are the basic principles? -- it gets kind of murky.

Take the debate that is happening now in the press between Hillary and Edwards on Iraq. He distinguished his position by saying that he would get 50,000 troops out right away while she wouldn't get them out right away.

When you talk to these people and listen to what they say on Iraq, they miss the entire point. The point is not what your tactic is. It's: What is your strategy? What is the strategic objective of your policy? Is your strategic objective the same as your tactical objective -- just get out and hope for the best? ... But what is your objective in Iraq?

[There is this] notion that all we have to do is to get out, which Bill Richardson is trying to develop. You just get out, and things will calm down because we're the catalyst causing the fighting. And the great one with Bill, God love him, is "Bring in an all-Muslim force." Give me a break. What is the last thing you want to do? You bring in a Sunni force? You bring in a Shia force?

... Tactically, I wouldn't take much issue with John Edwards' point that you draw down 50,000 troops right away. But what are you going to draw them down to do, John? I happen to think that's right ... But then what?

Ask Barack, ask John, ask Hillary. After they tell you what they're going to do [in Iraq], ask them, "Then what?" They don't answer the "then what?" Because then-what could be very bad. Then-what could be a regional war. Then-what could be both Turkey and Iran with military forces in Iraq. Then-what could be the Saudis making a very bad bet and concluding that they have to support the al-Qaida in Mesopotamia elements -- and al-Qaida, period -- because they're the only Sunnis who can fight.

My strategic objective is to get America out of that killing field. But leave behind a relatively stable, relatively representative republic that is not a threat to its neighbors, that's not a haven for terror and has an accommodation among the warring factions that over time can be ameliorated. That's as good as it will ever get in the next year.

Turning back to Iran...

We buy into this bumper-sticker foreign policy. The Democrats are buying into this bumper-sticker foreign policy. Imagine if you said to me, "I can take down Ahmadinejad. But the result would be that oil prices would be 35 percent higher, that I would increase the number of Americans dead from approaching 4,000 to 8,000, that I would end up with no rational way to lead without things go back to the way things were before or greater chaos."

I love these guys talking about how it's always human rights -- I'm glad that Bill [Richardson], God love him, wasn't president when we were fighting World War II -- because they sure as hell wouldn't have hung out with Stalin.

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