Vice President Biden is indeed literally in Iraq – and Iraqis, Americans and the rest of us out in the world can be very grateful that Joe Biden is taking a leading role in helping to promote sustainable and national political reconciliation in Iraq.

If Iraqis hold any sort of sub-rosa animostiy toward VP Biden because they regard him as someone who would break up their country, then I would have to say that those Iraqis are as ill-informed about what the Biden strategy for promoting a sustainable political settlement in Iraq is all about as are many Americans.

There are two main reasons for this misinformation – (1) the news media, in general, fail to understand the first thing about this comphrensive strategy…present company excepted, or so I had hoped and (2) the Bush administration, through officials at the US Embassy in Baghdad, engaged in what can only be described as an act of sheer sabotage as they wholly misrepresented what Biden had been advocating.

I suspect that the Obama administration is currently in the process of determining just how serious the Iraqi government is about moving toward real political reconciliation.

The Vice President's current trip to Iraq will shed a great deal of light on that subject as there is no one better positioned than VP Biden to assess the capacity and inclination of Prime Minister Nouri al' Maliki's government to make the political and constitutional compromises that will be necessary to reach a sustainable political settlement.

If Biden finds that the Iraqi government is serious about wanting to move toward national and sustainable political reconciliation, then I would expect to see President Obama working very closely with the Iraqi government along with the regional and major powers and the UN to move this process forward. Under such conditions, we could expect to see a substanial further withdrawal of US forces from Iraq within the next year.

However, if Biden determines that the Iraqi government is not serious about political and constitutional reform, then there is no reason to keep US forces in Iraq any longer and I would hope that the Iraqi government would be advised, in no uncertain terms, that there would be a hastened withdrawal of US forces – and civilians, for that matter – and a new strategy of containment would become the order of the day.