WILMINGTON, Del. -- The Everly Brothers are singing, the hamburgers are sizzling and so is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lightning started a serious fire at Joe Biden's house the day before, but here at Buckley's Tavern the heat is in the senator's reflections on the Iraq aftermath that he hopes and expects will be President Kerry's problem in less than six months.
``Very bad'' is his terse estimate of the current situation, in which Iraq's government has ``sovereignty but very little capacity.'' Prime Minister Allawi is ``good -- tough -- but no democrat.'' Rather, he is ``in the Mubarak mold.'' The Egyptian model may not be what the Bush administration's nation-builders and democracy-exporters hoped for, but Biden believes it is not an outcome to be disdained.
He relishes being home -- he commutes by train to Washington daily -- but he travels widely, recently to the police academy in Jordan where Iraq's constabulary is being formed. There, he says, the Iraqis who were sent for the initial class included a convicted murderer. When the man's past was discovered, he was sent home. But he was sent back to the academy with the second class. An instructor who was supposed to teach the police skill of ``evasive driving'' found that most trainees could not drive at all. So who, Biden wonders, is going to protect the 25,000 or more polling places when Iraq has elections?
Improvisation is the sour fruit of bad planning. Biden says he was told by a senior U.S. military officer in Iraq that his tank drivers are now doing infantry work, his infantry is doing engineering work and his engineers are doing civil affairs work. Biden was bewildered by the administration's resistance to the idea that after a swift military victory, which he expected, the problem in Iraq would be ``not the day after but the decade after.'' He says that because Kerry does not know the Iraq situation he will inherit, Kerry cannot tell the nation how long its Iraq commitment will last, ``unless he inherits Lebanon'' -- chaos -- ``and decides to get the hell out of there.''