Hey, Senator Biden

Shut up or start making sense. It’s your call.

Two days ago, I pointed y’all to a blog post by Chad at In the Bullpen examining the call by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Some asylum) to shut down the Guantanamo detention center. Chad appropriately titled the piece “Biden is Off His Rocker.”

Today, I’ve found more evidence that the man is losing his grip.

Having recently returned from his fifth visit to Iraq, Sen. Biden spoke of the need to avoid a complete withdrawal from the country.

“And if we leave now, I guarantee you there will be a civil war, which a lot of our folks are worrying about now anyway,” said Biden, D-Del., said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “We made a giant mistake in the beginning over the objection of a number from both parties.”

U.S. forces decommissioned the entire army, the so-called de- Ba`athification and that left Iraq with no military, according to Biden.

Biden said the training of Iraqi troops is on track, however, the United States waited a year and a half to start the process of training Iraqi troops.

A year and a half? That would be a tragic mistake indeed. By Biden’s count, the training of Iraqi forces by Americans did not begin until at least October 2004. Well, he’s been there five times — he must know what he’s talking about, right?

Wrong. In fact, not even close. In January 2004, the Department of Defense released the following:

The first of nine brigades planned for the new Iraqi army nearly is complete, the officer responsible for helping to rebuild the country’s military reported in a Baghdad briefing today.

Addressing progress in the rebuilding effort, Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, commander of the coalition’s military assistance and training team in Iraq, said three battalions of Iraqi soldiers have graduated from military training academies since October. The desired “end state” is to eventually have “Iraqi officers and soldiers take over the training of their own soldiers,” Eaton said.

“I would like to emphasize that this will be an Iraqi Army, trained by Iraqis,” he said.

And who were the Iraqis hoped to relieve from the duty of training their forces? You guessed it, the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to one of its own briefings from September 2003. Oh by the way, the coalition included Americans.

Let me begin with a little bit on the new Iraqi army, as such. The new Iraqi army began training the first battalion around the first of August, and that first battalion will be commissioned and enter operational service on October 4th, the training being now about three-quarters completed.

The training takes place at a place called Kirkush, which is an old Iraqi military base about 80 kilometers northeast of Baghdad and about 30 kilometers from the Iranian border, which we reconditioned and are using as the training facility. As battalions go through, we will expand the capacity of that facility and have something like four battalions ready and operational by early next year.

The actual day-to-day training is being done by U.S. contract trainers with very close Coalition military oversight. The military oversight is done by an organization called the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team, which is commanded by an American, Major-General Paul Eaton, who was, until he took up this assignment, the commander of infantry training for the United States Army. So we have sent our best expert on that issue.

His deputy is British, and his staff includes officers from a variety of Coalition countries.

NATO trainers began arriving in August 2004 to expand efforts, and a military academy for Iraqi officers was already in the works in October 2004, when Biden claims we became involved in training Iraqi forces.

Well, the good senator was only off by well over a year.

Then there’s another curious statement just today by the senator during the confirmation hearings on Zalmay Khalilzad, nominee for the position of U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, said on returning from his fifth visit to Baghdad that he and the American public were losing patience.

“I’m not sure I could in good faith, a year from now, if things aren’t drastically different, continue to support American forces being in Iraq because we just seem not to get it yet,” he told Mr Khalilzad. The US “loss” of Iraq would be an “absolute disaster for the better part of a generation”, he said.

Let me see if I can get a grip on this convoluted bilge spewing forth from Biden. Losing Iraq would be an absolute disaster but he cannot support the presence of our forces there another year without great improvement. Did I get that right? If things are not drastically improved, the senator would prefer to opt for what he himself sees as a tragedy.

He calls for the shutting down Gitmo, either lies or is grossly mistaken about American training efforts in a country where he’s been on the ground enough times to know better, and shows a convoluted but resoundingly spineless support of our efforts while knowing the dreadful consequence of failure.

Though I oppose the concept of term limits for members of the U.S. Congress, Biden does provide evidence to support at least consideration of the idea.