Joe Biden Is a Key Fighter in Dissolving Bush's 'Terror' Myths

In the end, then, it came down to this: Barack Obama needed a vice-presidential candidate with well-established Washington credentials, foreign policy experience and an ability to connect with blue-collar workers.

And while Joe Biden -- a 65-year old working class Irish Catholic, the Senator for Delaware since 1972, and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — has a far from unblemished foreign policy record (most notoriously in his support for the invasion of Iraq, but also, arguably, in his strenuous support for armed intervention in Kosovo, which, like that of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, paved the way for justifying war on a basis other then that of self-defense), he has since recanted his position on the Iraq war, and has, for many years, also been unafraid to tackle other excesses of the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies; in particular, through his persistent calls for the closure of the "War on Terror" prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Although he initially supported the invasion of Iraq (after trying, and failing, to persuade President Bush to first exhaust all diplomatic efforts), Sen. Biden has since become on of the war's toughest critics in the Senate. He warned of the costs of a long occupation before the war even began, and in 2006 he proposed, with Leslie Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a five-point plan for the future of Iraq, which called for a federalized system of three regional governments (Kurd, Sunni and Shiite) plus a centralized government for the management of "truly common interests" like oil and border defense.

Sen. Biden also has a more personal connection to Iraq. His son Beau, the attorney general of Delaware, is a captain in the Army National Guard, and is set to be deployed to Iraq in the fall, even though, as Sen. Biden explained last year, "I don't want him going. But I tell you what, I don't want my grandsons or granddaughters going back in 15 years. So how we leave makes a big difference."

Sen. Biden has also repeatedly cast doubt on the very notion of a "War on Terror," declaring, in a speech in April 2008, in which he lambasted the Bush administration for making "fear the main driver of our foreign policy," "Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and countries are using it toward very different goals. If we can't even identify the enemy or describe the war we're fighting, it's difficult to see how we will win."

Reassuringly, for those who care about the Bush administration's assault on fundamental human rights, holding prisoners neither as Prisoners of War protected by the Geneva Conventions nor as criminal suspects to be tried in US courts, Sen. Biden has been unstinting in his opposition to the prison at Guantánamo Bay. In June 2005, he called for Guantánamo to be closed, telling ABC News that it had "become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world."

Sen. Biden also voted against the much-criticized Military Commissions Act of 2006, which reintroduced military trials at Guantánamo after they were declared illegal by the US Supreme Court, and in May 2007 he co-sponsored the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility Closure Act, which not only called for the closure of Guantánamo, but also proposed moving prisoners against whom a case could be built to the maximum security military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and releasing all those who had not been charged. In July 2007, he followed this with proposals for a National Security with Justice Act, which sought to "prohibit extraterritorial detention and rendition, except under limited circumstances, to modify the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant' for purposes of military commissions, [and] to extend statutory habeas corpus to detainees."