“See that man, Barack? That’s Ahmadinejad. He’s tough, but reasonable. We can talk with him.”
“Biden’s political games have made him Tehran’s favorite senator.” “Biden’s Blink on Iran,” by Michael Rubin in the Washington Post, August 26 (thanks to JCB):
[…] As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is well versed in policy debates and carefully choreographed trips. But his record on the Islamic Republic of Iran — perhaps the chief national security threat facing the next president — suggests a persistent and dangerous judgment deficit. Biden’s unyielding pursuit of “engagement” with Iran for more than a decade has made it easier for Tehran to pursue its nuclear program, while his partisan obsession with thwarting the Bush administration has led him to oppose tough sanctions against hard-liners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
[…]
Biden’s political games have made him Tehran’s favorite senator. As Gen. David Petraeus struggled to unite Iraqis across the ethnic and sectarian divide, Iran’s Press TV seized on Biden’s plan for partitioning Iraq and featured his statements with the headline “US plans to disintegrate Iraq.” Biden’s attack-dog statements about U.S. policy failures emboldened Iranian hard-liners to defy diplomacy. In the Dec. 7, 2007, official sermon, Ayatollah Mohammad Kashani speaking on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader, declared, “This Senator [Biden] correctly says Israel could not suppress Hizbullah in Lebanon, so how can the U.S. stand face-to-face with a nation of 70 million? This is the blessing of the Guardianship of the Jurists [the theocracy] . . . which plants such thoughts in the hearts of U.S. senators and forces them to make such confessions.” The crowd met his statement with refrains of “Death to America.”
Obama picked Biden for experience, but he might also have considered judgment. When it comes to Iran, Biden could stare down dictators; too bad he blinks.