And so for a brief, enlightened period, Biden walked on the right side of history. He backed US intervention in the Balkans and supported the war in Kosovo and actually urged President Bill Clinton to prosecute it more thoroughly. Bristling with such success, he decided to take on Saddam Hussein and backed the Iraq war in 2003. This, by the way, was no me-tooism, meekly following President George W. Bush's lead. Biden was a gung-ho scourge of the Iraqi dictatorship. Saddam, he said, "was a long-term threat and a short-term threat to our national security" and that the US had "no choice but to eliminate that threat".

This bold assertiveness didn't last, though. As soon as things started to go badly, Biden reverted to type. In 2004, he touted and proudly paraded what became known as the Biden Plan, which got a lot of admiring attention in the US media. It was a proposal to split Iraq into three largely autonomous states - Kurdish, Shia and Sunni, within a loose federation - along Bosnia lines. Although he was repeatedly advised by US military officials on the ground and by Iraqis of all ethnic and religious stripes themselves that it was a non-starter, he insisted it was the answer.

So of course, when President Bush decided belatedly to change strategy in Iraq and launch the "surge", Biden opposed it fiercely. Last year, he supported a Senate resolution that would have required the president to withdraw all US combat troops by March 2008. Having initially tried to dismember the country, now he wanted the US to abandon it. A year later, the surge has worked and Iraq, one country, is moving at last towards peace and stability.

Biden, notoriously loquacious, doesn't talk much about the surge any more. He doesn't talk about the Biden Plan. And he certainly doesn't waste much time talking about the first Gulf War or the Cold War.