Biden nails it

I didn't hear all the Petraeus testimony yesterday, but of what I was able to listen to, the standout item for me was Joe Biden's opening statement in the afternoon session with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Looking for the clip today on YouTube, I first accidentally came across Biden's opening statement from the last time we did this - Petraeus' Senate surge testimony last September. Listening to that clip, I thought, "Huh, I'd thought Biden came on a little stronger than this." But I didn't realize until two-thirds of the way through that I was listening to something seven months old. Because what Biden has been advocating has been very consistent. To wit: this isn't working. To any extent it is working, it'll be undone whenever we leave, whether that's tomorrow or several years from now. And so we really need to leave right now. This withdrawal should be orderly and staged, and some force may likely remain for the discernible future to continue fighting the (very small) Al Qaeda powers in Iraq, and to train the Iraqi army. But in the main, we need to pull back our military, lick our wounds, and realign against the actual enemy in Afghanistan.

Biden's statement yesterday is the most cogent articulation I have lately heard of where we stand over there. It's calm, clear, reasoned, and unrelenting.

The clip doesn't seem to exist on YouTube; the best I can offer is CSPAN's page on yesterday's testimony, from which there's a link to Biden's statement in a Real file.