Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says the war in Iraq is standing in the way of the progress on challenges here at home.
"Iraq is sort of like a big boulder sitting in the middle of the road. In order to regain our flexibility domestically to deal with health care, to deal with global warming, to deal with the environment generally, to deal with energy, to deal with education — you need to end this war," Biden says. "We’re spending $100 billion a year on this war."
Biden, a six-term U.S. Senator from Delaware, says the only way to resolve the complexities of Iraq is to find a political solution and he asserts his rivals don’t offer the kind of specifics he does. "They’ll say, ‘Well, what I’m going to do is I’m going to start to remove troops’ or ‘I think we should change the mission.’ Then ask them a two word question: ‘Senator, Governor — then what?’ and see what they answer," Biden says. "There is no solution that’s military. It’s a political solution and the only way you can do it is the only way it’s ever happened peacefully in history. You’ve got to give the parties breathing room, separate them, a decentralized government giving them control over the fabric of their daily lives. Absent that, you can’t do it."
Biden is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He spoke this weekend at the Iowa Broadcast News Association convention in Clear Lake.