From Friday's Iraq snapshot:
Joe Biden: Thank you. Thank you. I could talk at length tonight about my experience in the Senate, as Vice President, things like that. But I want to be worthy of your vote and I want to be worthy of your trust. So let's get things straight from the start, America. I have made mistakes in my life. And I am making real efforts to learn from them. My vote for the Iraq War was a mistake -- a huge mistake. In the past, I've sounded like a spoiled child as I tried to pass that vote off as being the fault of someone else. I voted for it, it was the wrong vote. That's on me and I want to learn from that moment. I want to grow from it. There are so many Americans and, yes, so many Iraqis who lost their lives. Earning your trust means acknowledging also my mistakes after the war started. Instead of demanding accountability and a strategy and goals that could be measures, up until February 2008, I repeatedly focused on splitting Iraq up into three parts as though that was an answer. I finally gave up on that misguided idea not because the Iraqi people had rejected the idea -- they had long rejected it -- but because my fellow senators made it abundantly clear that this idea had no Congressional support. Still, I did not call for all US troops out of Iraq.
I'd like to tell you that I had this blistering moment of insight and, from that moment forward, I was on a steady course. But that wasn't the road I took. Yes, in April of 2008, I did issue a statement where I declared, "The President confirmed what I've been saying for some time -- he has no plan to end this war. His plan is to muddle through and then to hand the problem off to his successor. So the result of the surge is that we're right back where we started before it began 15 months ago: with 140,000 troops in Iraq, spending $3 billion every week, losing 30 to 40 American lives every month -- and still no end in sight." Even more important, and more on the money, I chaired a Senate Committee hearing on April 11, 2008. In that hearing, I made several statements that, even right now, I am proud of.
I talked of the agreement the Bush White House was trying to put together with Prime Minister Nouri al-Malikki and how it raised "many red flags with me and other Americans. We've pledged we're not only going to consult when there is an outside threat, but also when there is an inside threat. We've just witnessed when Mr. Maliki engaged in the use of force against another Shia group in the south, is this an inside threat?" Maliki turned out to be an inside threat. When I was Vice President, we began a drawdown -- not a withdrawal as promised -- and, the day after the drawdown, Maliki began using tanks to circle the homes of his political opponents in Parliament He began openly persecuting his political rivals. Whereas before he had used secret prisons and torture cells on various Iraqi civilians, he was not declaring war on elected officials who did not agree with him.
Now in that April 2008 hearing, I did have the insight or luck to see what lay on the road ahead. That is why I noted that Bush's proposed agreement was requiring that we "take sides in Iraq's civil war" and that "there is no Iraq government that we know of that will be inplace a year from now -- half the government has walked out."
Let's stop for a moment register that. In April of 2008, I made some very accurate remarks.
In March of 2010, two years later, when I was Vice President, Iraq held elections. The big loser? Maliki. And he refused to step down. For eight months he refused to step down. President Obama had tasked me with Iraq, put me in charge of Iraq. The Iraqi people, despite threats and despite violence on election day, turned out to vote for their future. We, the United States, said we were bringing democracy to them, gifting them with democracy, if you will. And yet we did not stand by the results of that election. Instead, we went around those results. We tossed them aside. I was part of the American group that negotiated a treaty or contract known as The Erbil Agreement. It gave Maliki a second term -- a second term the voters did not give him. To get that second term, we drew up this contract among the various political parties. To get them to sign on, we had promises written into the agreement that they wanted -- the Kurds, for example, wanted the referendum on Kirkuk -- promised in the Iraqi Constitution -- finally implemented. We swore this was a binding contract. Maliki got his second term with that contract and then refused to honor the agreement. What's worse? We didn't demand that he honor it despite our earlier promise that we would -- a promise that President Obama repeated to Ayad Allawi, the winner of the election, November 11, 2010, when The Erbil Agreement seemed in jeopardy, President Obama personally called Allawi to assure him that we would stand by that contract which, included for Allawi, becoming the chair of a newly created National Council On Higher Policy.. As Ben Lando, Sam Dagher and Margaret Coker (Wall St. Journal) reported, "Mr. Obama, in his phone call to Mr. Allawi on Thursday, promised to throw U.S. weight behind the process and guarantee that the council would retain meaningful and legal power, according to the two officials with knowledge of the phone call."
Throughout 2010, I failed to step in. I failed to insist that we stop making deals with Maliki. I failed to insist that we show the Iraqi people the importance of voting and that their vote matters. Since 2010, the voter turnout in Iraq has gone down and that's a direct result of the US government, of me, tossing out their votes in 2010 because we thought Maliki would better serve the United States.
Not only did that undercut belief in democracy for the Iraqi people, it also set the stage for the rise of ISIS in Iraq. It was a disaster, Maliki's second term. As he persecuted Sunnis, ISIS rose in response. Were it not for his second term, you can argue that ISIS would not have risen in Iraq.
How did I, in 2008, realize what Maliki was? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while she was a US Senator in 2008, called Maliki a "thug" in an open hearing and she was correct about that.
So what changed?
What changed was that 'we' were in charge now. Not the Bush administration, us. President Obama, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, myself and others. We were in charge. Instead of working from what we knew, we worked on hubris. We were so much smarter that we could do all the things Bush had tried already and that had failed already but because we were doing them, somehow they would magically work out this time.
Hubris.
As I look back on Iraq, my biggest regret is how hubris misled me. It was and is a hard lesson to learn. But I'm standing here before you -- goodness knows, this is an open setting -- and I'm explaining what went wrong and what I did wrong.
My belief is that I have learned from these things. But by sharing this with you, I can make sure that you will hold me accountable. I can make sure that if I'm president and start talking war on some nation, you the America people will say, 'Hey, Joe, reflect for a moment and make sure this is what your gut is telling you is right and that you're not a victim of your own hubris again.' Because we are in this together and I want to be your president. But, more than just wanting to be your president, I want to be the best president you can have. That requires us working together: You supporting me when I'm right and you questioning me when I'm wrong. We can only do that by being honest with one another.