Say it ain't so, Joe

The Washington Post has an opinion column by Jackson Diehl on-line:

Joe Biden is getting credit for being more “factual” and substantive than Sarah Palin in last night’s debate. He shouldn’t. A good deal of what Biden said was exaggerated, distorted or simply false — especially in his nominal area of expertise, foreign policy.
Let’s start with Iraq. Biden claimed that John McCain was the “odd man out” in his plans for the war, while the Bush administration and the Iraqi government had adopted the strategy of Barack Obama. The truth is just the opposite. The administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are still negotiating about the future of the U.S. troop presence, but according to the latest reports they are close to settling on a target date for withdrawal at the end of 2011. That’s a year and a half after Obama’s 16-month timetable would run out. More importantly, Bush, Maliki, U.S. commanders and McCain all agree that the pullout should be “conditions-based” -- it should go forward only as Iraqi forces are able to take over. As Biden confirmed last night, the Obama pullout is not based on conditions; his theory is that the timetable will force action by Iraqis, rather than the other way around. When he visited Iraq in July, Obama was candid enough to confirm that Gen. David Petraeus, Maliki and leaders of the Sunni militia forces all opposed his strategy. On Iraq, he remains the odd man out.
Biden also charged that the United States spends more in Iraq in three weeks than it has in total in Afghanistan. As Chris Wilson of Slate points out, that comes close to being true only if total U.S. spending in Iraq is compared only with non-military spending in Afghanistan -- and even then it’s not true. The United States spends about $8 billion in three weeks in Iraq, compared with a total of $12 billion in non-military spending since 2001 in Afghanistan. In total, Congress has authorized $172 billion in spending for Afghanistan -- or about 61 weeks of spending in Iraq.
Biden said he could find no difference between McCain and Bush on policy toward Israel, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. He’s right -- there is no real difference. But what he failed to disclose is that there is also no significant difference between Obama’s proposals for those countries and what the Bush administration is doing. Biden denied that Obama agreed to meet unconditionally with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There he was both right and wrong: Obama did say he would do so in answer to a debate question more than a year ago, but he has since hedged his position considerably. As a practical matter, it’s very unlikely Obama would meet Ahmadinejad if he became president.
Lastly, Biden asserted that both he and Obama had opposed the staging of Palestinian legislative elections in 2005, and had predicted that if they were held Hamas would win. In fact, while Obama signed a letter (with more than 90 other senators) expressing concern that Hamas would participate in the election without disarming, he did not predict the Hamas victory. And Biden did not sign the letter; indeed, he served as an observer at the election that he now says should not have gone forward.

Rico says they're politicians; if their lips are moving, they're lying...