Joe Biden, country killer

Back then, Biden was optimistic. “I can tell you that when we came to office, we had, we had over 150,000 folks there, a war with no political end in sight. And after three years, we’ve met our commitment, brought the war to a responsible end,” the then-vice president told an NPR interviewer. History did judge. Just three years later, U.S. military forces were back to combat the threat posed by the Islamic State — a threat that had arisen in the vacuum of America’s withdrawal. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died, centuries-old churches were dynamited, and ISIS radicals raped countless Yazidis, some of whom remain enslaved today in areas of Syria controlled by Turkish-backed militias.

Biden remains best known in Iraq for his 2006 article proposing Iraq’s division into three ethnic and sectarian Bantustans. It was a recipe for disaster and civil war, given that fault lines between Iraq’s constituent communities are not so neatly defined. It also provided Iran with a tremendous propaganda boost since Tehran could tell Iraqi Shiites that the U.S. sought to undermine the empowerment democracy brought the Shiites and that they had no choice but to return to Iran’s umbrella. Biden renounced his opinions, but the damage was done.

The decision to end the combat mission in Iraq is strike three for Biden. Top aides might whisper that this is less a withdrawal than a rebranding, but such nuance and spin means little outside Washington. The images of the Taliban’s rout of Afghan forces against the backdrop of Biden’s other unilateral withdrawal matter. The message Biden has sent U.S. adversaries, including Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, and Pakistan, is that the U.S. does not stand by its allies and does not have the will to fight. If Iranian agents or their proxies increase attacks against American personnel and diplomatic property, Tehran believes it can force a more complete American withdrawal. After all, it worked for Hezbollah in Lebanon during the Reagan administration, for warlords in Somalia under Bill Clinton, and now in Afghanistan, so why should Iraq be different?

The simple fact is that first in Afghanistan and now in Iraq, Biden is ordering a drawdown for political reasons linked more to his progressive base than to facts. Perhaps he believes he can blame former President Donald Trump, who initially ordered the Afghan withdrawal, but leadership is not about abetting a disaster because it can be blamed on someone no longer in power.

What Biden has done, even if Trump began it, could destroy Afghanistan and will kneecap Iraq. Biden will never pay the price, but Iraqis, Afghans, and millions of new refugees likely will. Even if Iraq does not fail in the way Afghanistan may now do, he effectively abandons Iraq to militias whose national loyalty is more to Iran than Iraq. By giving these groups free range, Biden is essentially allowing them to loot Iraq on Tehran’s behalf. While many Americans assume that Iran finances the Iraqi militias, many Iraqis have said for the last two or three years that the flow of capital has gone the other way: Iraqi militias send money back to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can expect a windfall as the U.S. largely abandons Iraq. That’s money that it will reinvest in insurgencies destabilizing Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria and perhaps soon Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, or the West Bank.

Almost every decision Biden takes in the Middle East undermines U.S. national security, emboldens enemies, and exacerbates human tragedy. All senators look in the mirror and see a future president, and all presidents obsess about their legacy. Biden’s legacy is shaping up to be that of a country killer.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.