Was Joe Biden right? It’s the question swirling through the punditocracy as it debates the latest installment of the can’t-watch, can’t-turn-away reality show, “President Obama’s Very Bad Year.”
The question emanates from a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed that then-Sen. Joe Biden co-authored in The New York Times, in which he suggests that war-torn Iraq should be divided into a confederacy with a weak central government and three largely autonomous states — one for the Sunnis, another for the Shiites, and another for the Kurds.
But the question, while amusing to mull over, is an irrelevant one. ISIS isn’t close to marching on Baghdad because Joe Biden’s big idea never came to fruition. It isn’t close to marching on Baghdad because we installed a Shiite regime in Nouri al-Maliki either. Nor is it close to marching on Baghdad because George W. Bush once sent American troops to, well, march on Baghdad.