When Barack Obama became U.S. president, he had thought a great deal about foreign policy—as he had thought a great deal about many things—but had barely practiced it at all. That was where his vice president came in handy. Joe Biden, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had the chance to be on a first-name basis with various heads of state since Obama had been taking social studies classes at the Punahou School in Honolulu.
When Obama needed someone to straighten out the mess in Iraq, whose leader, Nouri al-Maliki, seemed to be paying a good deal more attention to Tehran than to Washington, he turned to Biden—or so Biden told me at the time—and said, “Joe, you do Iraq.”
