Yesterday's Man by Branko Marcetic

Author:Branko Marcetic
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Verso Books

Viceroy Biden

Despite winning what seemed like a mandate, Bush’s standing and popularity swiftly plummeted in the years that followed. Conditions in Iraq were deteriorating thanks to sectarian conflict and a violent insurgency that took aim at Iraq’s occupiers. Meanwhile, a sizable antiwar movement was making its influence felt, both in the halls of power and on the streets, where it attracted hundreds of thousands of protesters. Dissatisfaction with Bush and his party was magnified by his botched response to Hurricane Katrina’s leveling of New Orleans and a ceaseless tide of scandals, often involving corruption. It all culminated in a 2006 wave election in which the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in twelve years. The political winds had shifted, and Biden took notice.64

After getting middling scores from the ACLU for his embrace of Bush’s anti-privacy national security program, Biden received a rare 100 percent rating for 2005 and 2006. He voted against Bush’s attorney general nominee Alberto Gonzales, one of the men behind the administration’s legal rationale for torture, and he pulled out all the stops to keep John Bolton, an ultranationalist fanatic who appeared to want to wage war against seemingly half the world, from the UN ambassador’s chair. He started talking about an exit strategy for Iraq, spoke out forcefully against Bush’s hint that he might send troops to neighboring Iran and Syria, and opposed Bush’s planned “surge” in Iraq, meant to stabilize the country and create a political reconciliation between its feuding religious sects by deploying tens of thousands more US troops.65

In 2007, with Democrats back in the driver’s seat and Biden back chairing the Foreign Relations Committee, he did what he should have done five years earlier and launched a concerted campaign of opposition to Bush’s plans. He wrote an op-ed calling the surge idea a failure, accused the White House of plotting to saddle the next president with an Iraq it knew was lost, and announced weeks of hearings on Bush’s Iraq policy to influence GOP lawmakers and the public and create “overwhelming consensus” against the idea. In mid-January, he sponsored an anti-surge resolution meant to show its lack of support in the Senate, later announcing that he would try to repeal the 2002 war authorization he’d voted for. “The WMD were not there,” he explained.66

But this turn only went so far. Biden voted to keep funding the war well into 2007 and refused to set a deadline for withdrawal. He campaigned for Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, a hawkish Democrat whose steadfast support for Bush in Iraq earned him a kiss from the president, against his antiwar primary challenger. When Bush’s secret program of warrantless surveillance of Americans finally came to light—a scandalous action that the New York Times had learned about during the 2004 election but kept secret at the president’s request—Biden offered only muted criticism, saying it should not continue “unabated without any review.” Defying the lessons of the last three years, he pushed to send US troops to another far-off conflict, this time in Darfur.

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