When Vice-President Joe Biden places phone calls to people he knows, he occasionally skips the White House operator, dials direct, and catches them unprepared. On formal calls with foreign leaders, he sticks to the protocol, but tries to work in some patter—grandkids, food, weather. Last month, USA Today tabulated White House phone records and found that Biden had placed more calls to Iraq—sixty-four of them, to be exact—than to any other country. (The President, by contrast, had called Iraq four times.)
For better or worse, Iraq has been Biden’s bag ever since a national-security meeting, in the summer of 2009, when Obama turned to him and said, “Joe, you do Iraq”—a moment with all the historical majesty of doling out household chores. To the Administration’s critics, that hand-off was a sign of Obama’s disregard for what he considered the “dumb war” (compared to the “good war,” in Afghanistan). For Biden, who had run unsuccessfully for President on a pledge to get the United States out of Iraq, it was a chance to emerge from a quagmire as expeditiously as possible. Five years later, the assignment is unfulfilled.
Biden never had much confidence in Iraq’s political coherence. In 2006, Biden, then a senator, co-authored an Op-Ed in the Times with Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they made the case for a federation of Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite regions, overseen by a central government but “responsible for their own domestic laws, administration and internal security.” Many foreign-policy commentators accused them of promoting a drastically unworkable policy. “It was radical for my fellows in the foreign-policy community, who hadn’t thought of it and who kept on condemning it as ‘partitioning,’ ” Gelb told me recently. “Almost all the criticism called it ‘partitioning.’ I love to argue, but that was just bullshit.”
Biden and Gelb did not, in fact, call for the partitioning of Iraq; they called for a power-sharing arrangement that might accommodate the intensifying centrifugal force of ethnic and religious divisions. Whether you thought that was nuts depended on whether you thought Iraqis could share power. To their critics, the plan would be akin to igniting the underbrush in the hope of preventing a full-blown forest fire. (As it turned out, the Iraqis wrote a version of the federal system into their Constitution, but it was never implemented.)
Once he became the President’s point person on Iraq, Biden had to stop talking up the federal plan, to prevent the appearance that the White House wanted to neuter the government in Baghdad. On the contrary, Biden embraced the figure he decided was most likely to keep the country together, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, despite growing complaints from U.S. diplomats and advisers that Maliki was becoming a strongman who was alienating Sunnis and stoking the return of open sectarian conflict. Emma Sky, who was the chief political adviser to General Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told me, “The White House became impatient,” and that Biden decided that the best route “was to support Maliki as Prime Minister—and pressure and persuade the others to agree to this.”
When I was profiling Biden last month, his advisers argued against Sky’s version, saying that they had never favored Maliki, and had backed him because he won the support of a majority in Iraq. But that reading of history underplays Biden’s activism. Michael R. Gordon and retired Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, in their book “The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama,” described a video conference in October, 2010, in which Biden predicted that Maliki would sign on to a Status of Forces Agreement to keep U.S. troops on the ground. “Maliki wants us to stick around because he does not see a future in Iraq otherwise,” Biden said, according to the account. “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA.”
Neither of those predictions came true. Maliki did not deliver, and U.S. forces left Iraq in December, 2011. As the crisis deepened this spring, the White House did not openly disparage Maliki, but made it clear that it was ready for a change. By all estimates, that sentiment was long overdue, and this week, America’s protracted divorce from Maliki is nearing completion. Obama has returned American military aircraft to the skies over Iraq, authorizing strikes to protect U.S. diplomatic missions and religious and ethnic minorities, and to prevent Sunni militants from advancing on the Kurdish city of Erbil. On Monday, another political sinkhole opened in Baghdad: the President nominated a new Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, to replace Maliki. But Maliki has refused to give up power; on television, he vowed to use legal action to challenge the decision, while security forces loyal to him were seen taking up positions around the city.
The man who was once our man in Baghdad now has the potential to spark another sectarian political disaster. The Constitution allows Maliki to remain the commander in chief of Iraq’s security forces for up to thirty days while the new premier, Abadi, seeks to form a government. Secretary of State John Kerry warned Monday that any effort to cling to power would mean an end to American aid. “And our hope is that Mr. Maliki will not stir those waters,” Kerry said. But Maliki is said to fear giving up his office because he will lose immunity from prosecution. Moreover, he may have lost touch with reality; he has “gone out of his mind, and lives on a different planet—he doesn’t appreciate the mess he has created,” an Iraqi official told the Times.
Meanwhile, as the government in Baghdad has drifted deeper into dysfunction, Biden’s old notion of a federal, decentralized Iraq has gone from a radical proposal to a blunt acknowledgement of reality. Stratfor, the intelligence-analysis firm, predicted last week that Iraq “will largely behave as a confederation over time.” Almost nobody is pretending that this is a desirable outcome. Daniel Serwer, who was the executive director of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, warned, “No one will agree on where the separation lines should be drawn. We call the result of armed quarrels over borders ‘war.’ ” And yet, Zalmay Khalilzad and Kenneth Pollack, Iraq experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Institution, have come to see federal separation as the “best—or perhaps just the least bad” option at the moment.
The Administration, for lack of a better option, appears to agree. The Iraq war, and its aftermath, have always been a bitter improvisation. The Obama Administration once hoped that it would be able to cite its exit from Iraq as a measure of its success, but those hopes have evaporated. The best that Obama and Biden can hope for today is to contain further damage.
On Monday, Biden made the break with Maliki official by using a familiar tool at his disposal: he placed yet another call to Iraq. This time, it was not to Maliki but to al-Abadi, the nominee for Prime Minister. Biden offered an American “commitment to fully support a new and inclusive Iraqi government.” And he congratulated al-Abadi on his new job.
