WASHINGTON, 10 September 2003 — It says something about Washington’s current state of political apathy when the senior ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee addresses the National Press Club — and the turnout is small and most of the guests present are not journalists.
Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, who is not running for the Democratic presidential ticket, is one of the few men in Congress who is openly critical of the Bush administration and the war on Iraq.
And he used yesterday as another opportunity to voice his contempt.
The Bush administration’s “U-turn on Iraq, still leaves our foreign policy headed in the wrong direction,” said Biden, who than attacked the “neo-conservatives in this administration who discount the value and utility of international institutions we’ve built and put a premium on the use of unilateral military power, even if it means alienating the world.”
Nor did Biden spare his own party: “The knee-jerk multilaterals in my own party who have not yet faced the reality of the post 9/11 world and believe that we can only exercise power if we get the world’s approval first. We cannot and must not conduct foreign policy at the extremes. The stakes are too high.”
Biden, who predicted an attack similar to Sept. 11 at the NPC 24 hours before the tragic event, said the Bush administration’s priorities, polices, and actions demonstrate too narrow a definition of US national security.
“To move this nation in the right direction, we need to embrace a foreign policy of enlightened nationalism,” he said.
First is the need to correct the imbalance between projecting power and staying power, he said. “Staying power is just as important as projecting power and the administration is running a dangerous deficit.”
Focusing on areas of US intervention, Biden said America’s failure to extend security beyond Kabul has “handed most of the country back to the warlords as many of us predicted.
“The failure to win the peace in Afghanistan risks being repeated in Iraq unless we stay the new course the president set on Sunday night,” said Biden.
Not doing so, he said, would condemn both countries as failed states, and risk the collapse of Pakistan while enhancing the power and influence of Iran.
Biden said the Bush administration has “turned preemption from a necessary option into a one-size-fits-all doctrine that threatens to make us less secure.
“It tells our enemies that their only possible insurance policy against regime change is to acquire weapons of mass destruction as quickly as they can. It sends a message to fault line states, from India and Pakistan to China and Taiwan, to Israel and its Arab neighbors, that if the United States can shoot first and ask questions later, so can they.”
This administration’s “our way of the highway” approach is not a way to win friends and support, he said. “Why should other countries help us with our concerns if we show distain for theirs?”
Focusing on the threat of terrorism, which he calls “the most urgent threat we face,” Biden said the focus must also include “the spread of weapons of mass destruction, international crime and drug trafficking, ethnic wars, infectious disease, environmental decay, and poverty and despair.”
