Reader Poll: What’s The Dumbest Thing That Iraq Czar Biden Has Said About Iraq?

Rahm’s spin to Newsweek about this bizarre appointment was that Biden “knows the players… he brings a lot of experience and expertise on this issue to the table.” Which is weird, because he actually seems to know nothing about the players and keeps making experienced, expert recommendations that would trigger full-blown regional wars.

Here are your candidates for Biden’s dumbest Iraq-related comment or idea. I’ve dumped a poll after the jump if you feel particularly strongly about one of the choices:

(A) Calling the success of the surge a “fantasy” – At the present there seems to be a consensus that this was at best a touch over-wrought, displaying a less than astute understanding of Iraq. Just wait a few months though. As violence continues to escalate, the left will begin reciting no end of talking points demonstrating that the surge never fixed anything. Which brings us to…

(B) Claiming that he got shot at inside the Green Zone – That was quite the politicized Walter Mitty fantasy, given that the election pivoted on foreign policy judgment pivoted on the success of the surge and the stabilization of Iraq. Open question: what’s worse, that he was intentionally making it up or that he’s actually delusional and has no understanding of 2006-2009 Iraqi security dynamics?

(C) Crafting a plan to partition Iraq into 3 regions – This was so blisteringly stupid that Iraqi factions locked in a civil war came together to mock Biden in unison. It’s still a weight on his presence in the region. The particularly awesome thing about this plan – which would have codifying ethnic boundaries and undercut the nationalist Iraqis of the Anbar Awakening – is that it also would have guaranteed Iranian and Saudi intervention. “Experience and expertise.”

(D) Thanking Zapatero for Spain’s help in Iraq – I don’t think this was technically a gaffe, at least not in the sense that he didn’t know Zapatero bailed on Iraq. Biden’s been obsessed with the awesomeness of post-appeasement Spain since the election: it was one of the repeated, obnoxious namechecks that he kept going to during the VP debate, setting up the MSM to coo about his mastery of geopolitics. So it probably seemed automatic to praise them for something. Or maybe he really does think that Spain’s ignoble abandonment of the Coalition was helpful, to the extent that it undermined Bush.

(E) The US has to be “much more aggressive in forcing [Iraqi officials] to deal with” issues – This was a few months ago. What a charmer. He’s going to be welcomed with open arms in Baghdad.

Click through for the poll. I turned off PollDaddy’s built-in comments, but feel free to explain your vote under this post on MR’s Facebook Page.