Beyond the Dome

There was really only one reason for Barack Obama to pick Joe Biden as his running mate: the foreign policy credibility Biden would bring as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Biden certainly lives up to his billing in terms of knowledge and expertise, but if Obama thinks he can count on Biden to keep him out of trouble, he might be in for a disappointment.

Biden’s biggest moment as a foreign policy watchdog came when he held a series of hearings in 2002 about the prospect of war with Iraq. If there was ever a time to ask aggressive questions and pin administration witnesses down about what was ahead, that was it. Instead, Biden would ask insightful questions — some of which foreshadowed exactly the dilemmas the United States faces now — and then let them go, sometimes dismissing them with jokes.

Take his Sept. 26, 2002 hearing with Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, as the star witness. Biden asked Powell to explain how the Bush administration would know when it was safe to bring U.S. troops home. “I’m not looking for an exit strategy in timing. But what is the end game?” Biden asked.

Powell gave something short of an ironclad answer: that the troops could come home when Iraq had “something that will be seen by the international community as a representative government that will keep this stage together” and wouldn’t develop any more weapons of mass destruction. (No one at that hearing was seriously questioning whether Saddam Hussein had them.) “I think it will take time. And I can’t tell you how many years,” Powell said.

That thought caught Biden’s attention. “One thing is clear: When we succeed militarily, if we decide we have to go, it will not be like the Gulf War when Johnny comes marching home within three to five days or several weeks or a month. Some Johnnies are going to stay there,” Biden said. Then, he let it go: “I’m not opposing that.”

Later, Biden came up with an eerily accurate summary of the challenge the United States now faces. “I hope the State Department, which is very good at coming up with phrases, comes up with a new word for nation building, because that’s what we’re going to be doing,” Biden said. And everyone in the hearing room had a good laugh.

And about those weapons of mass destruction: If Biden had any skepticism about whether he existed, he kept them to himself. “Many of us share the conviction that Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and his possession of some already — especially his pursuit of nuclear weapons, which I do not believe he possesses — pose a significant threat to Iraq’s people, its region and to the world,” Biden said that day. “Ultimately, in my view, either he must be dislodged from his weapons or dislodged from power.”

Obama has spent much of his campaign arguing that experience is overrated. Oddly, though, he has picked a running mate who just might prove his point.