PrintAugust 25, 2008
Amir Taheri on Biden's crank ideas on foriegn policy
Amir Taheri is a keen student of foreign policy and American interests. He has consistently advocated regime change in Iran as a way to separate the clearly pro-American Iranian people from the despotic anti-American clerics who run the country.
In this New York Post article, he looks at some of Joe Biden's career from a foriegn policy angle and finds the Delaware senator wanting in a number of areas:
In this New York Post article, he looks at some of Joe Biden's career from a foriegn policy angle and finds the Delaware senator wanting in a number of areas:
Biden has the experience of more than three decades in the US senate, at least two of them dealing with foreign affairs and defense. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. And Biden has been wrong on almost every key issue.* In 1979, he shared Carter's starry-eyed belief that the fall of the shah in Iran and the advent of the ayatollahs represented progress for human rights. Throughout the hostage crisis, as US diplomats were daily paraded blindfolded in front of television cameras and threatened with execution, he opposed strong action against the terrorist mullahs and preached dialogue.* Throughout the 1980s. Biden opposed President Ronald Reagan's proactive policy against the Soviet Union. Biden was all for détente - which, in practice, meant Western subsidies that would have enabled the moribund USSR to cling to life and continue doing mischief.* In 1990, Biden found it difficult to support President George Bush's decision to use force to kick Saddam Hussein's army of occupation out of Kuwait.
* A decade-plus later, the senator did vote for the liberation of Iraq from Saddamite tyranny. But as soon as terrorists started challenging the new democratic system in Iraq, he switched sides and became a critic of the whole war effort. He claimed that the Iraq war was lost and suggested that the US partition the newly liberated country into three or more mini-states.
Taheri quotes Biden from the 2004 World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland:
Our next Vice President?The US, he claimed, had no moral authority to preach democracy in the Middle East. "We don' have much of a democracy ourselves, " he said mockingly. "Remember our own presidential election; remember Florida!"
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
