Biden Explains the Democratic Iraq Plan

Published April 3, 2007 7:23pm ET



It’s hard to catch a Democrat who will actually explain the party’s vision for Iraq after they complete the troop pullout they advocate. Joe Biden is universally regarded as one of the party’s brighter and more sober minds, as well as an important leader on foreign policy. His comments on Countdown are illuminating. I don’t have an official transcript; this is my own rendition. Biden first discusses the period right after the liberation of Baghdad, and says that at that time, a ‘surge’ was the right policy:

…We did not do what we were supposed to do then – what many of us urged, which was to immediately get paramilitary police in there – to increase the number of troops we had to stabilize the country to begin to pass on responsibility to the Iraqis quickly.
What did we do? We had too few troops. We didn’t do any of what I suggested and Civil War broke out.

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