Prediction: Joe Biden will run in 2008

Do you know why Hillary Clinton sits on the Senate Armed Services committee? Because she knows that in the post-9/11 world, global security trumps all other issues. If she wants to run for president in 2008, she needs to position herself as an experienced pol on the military, world affairs, and national security.

Senator Joe Biden has hinted that he might run for the Oval Office and he also needs to burnish his security credentials. The Delaware politician has penned an article for the Washington Monthly titled “Credit Bush’s rhetoric not his actions” with a couple of interesting declarations. The first is essentially that the deposition of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent elections in Iraq have nothing to do with the wave of democratic reforms in the Middle East. More to the point, President Bush fell ass-backward into good luck at just the right time:

If we have reached a true tipping point, it seems to have been generated by recent events that had little or nothing to do with the Iraqi invasion: Arafat's death, the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, terror attacks in Saudi Arabia, and the increasingly vocal protests in Egypt. And in Iraq, while it cannot be denied that the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein was a necessary precondition, it was Ayatollah Sistani who insisted on early elections against the wishes of the White House. President Bush decided to accede to Sistani's wishes and deserves kudos for showing firmness in sticking to the schedule.

In fact, Mr. Foreign Affairs wants to assure Americans Democratic delegates that everything the president has done is wrong, wrong, wrong:

At the same time, other repercussions of our unilateral invasion and occupation may have had the opposite effect. The level of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East has skyrocketed, and a new generation of terrorists has been trained in the art of guerrilla warfare on the streets of Iraq. We may still succeed in Iraq; indeed, I believe we must. But our mishandling of the Iraq occupation has also allowed autocrats in the region to use the post-Saddam chaos as justification for denying their people more freedom.

If you say so, Joe. I’d love to see your proof of “skyrocketing anti-Americanism” since I can’t find anything on Google post-Iraqi elections. No matter! He’s Joe Biden asking that timeless question: “Who are you going to believe? That Iraqi woman with the purple finger or your lying eyes?”