The hidden hand of Joe Biden Glenn Thrush July 2, 2010 04:27 AM EDT     Having Vice President Joe Biden (left) around is critical for President Barack Obama, a relative novice on foreign policy.

When President Barack Obama announced in the Rose Garden last week that he had sacked Gen. Stanley McChrystal, he also made a point of telling his fractious Afghanistan team that he welcomed “debate” but would not abide “division.”

The poster child for that all-for-one approach was standing directly on the president’s right: Vice President Joe Biden.

On Afghanistan, Obama’s most problematic foreign policy issue, Biden has earned the president’s respect and confidence by being both private skeptic and public cheerleader for administration policy. With a combination of subtlety and discretion that belie his reputation as a glad-handing chatterbox, Biden has parlayed the tricky dual role into a steady — if somewhat improbable — path to power in the Obama White House.

“He’s a total team player,” says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the member of Obama’s inner circle who has most forcefully pushed the idea of expanding Biden’s role as a foreign affairs troubleshooter.

“His job is to help the president to weigh these competing equities. There’s not good and bad choices here; it’s all these complexities, and he helps him think through all these equities,” Emanuel said.

The sudden firing of McChrystal — whose staff, according to Rolling Stone, nicknamed Biden “Joe Bite Me” — marked another milestone in the role Biden has embraced as what he calls “the skunk at the family picnic.”

Biden joined other top advisers in the Oval Office on the morning of McChrystal’s forced retirement for the final debate over McChrystal’s fate. He also was one of the first to suggest Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s replacement, despite occasional clashes with the general over Afghanistan and Iraq war policy, according to a senior administration official.

Later that day, Biden pulled Petraeus aside after a meeting Obama convened in the White House Situation Room to say that he was “100 percent” behind the new Afghanistan commander and the counterinsurgency approach he initially questioned last fall.

Biden then suggested that the two have dinner. Could Petraeus come to Wilmington that weekend? No, the general said. But when he heard Biden planned to travel to Pensacola for an inspection tour of the Gulf oil spill, he invited the vice president to Tampa, which, until this week, was his home base as head of the U.S. Central Command.

Tuesday night, hours after his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington, Petraeus served Biden and his aide Tony Blinken sea bass, cucumber soup, Florida salad and banana flambé during a genteel, mostly social dinner that concluded with a tour of the general’s library.

No heavy discussion, a person familiar with the meeting told POLITICO — just a general conversation about the sacrifices being made by the troops and their families.

Biden’s theme: We’re all on the same page.

But the gestures masked a more complex reality. Last fall, as Petraeus and McChrystal were pushing for an increase of as many as 80,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Biden proposed an alternative strategy that focused on hunting Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with far fewer troops. And while supporting Obama’s eventual decision to deploy more troops, Biden apparently remains deeply skeptical that President Hamid Karzai can ever run a functional state.

Obama, who has mandated the start of troop withdrawal in July 2011, has quietly encouraged his vice president to challenge existing assumptions about the war, even if it means rattling the military and the administration’s own officials.

“That’s what the president wants, and if he didn’t want [Biden] to do it, he’d shut it off,” Emanuel said.

Having Biden around is critical for Obama, a relative novice on foreign policy who was in high school when Biden was clambering up the seniority ladder on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Biden’s the voice of experience in the White House on this stuff,” said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, who once co-authored a plan with Biden to divide Iraq into three ethnically based federal districts.

“Biden’s got far more experience than all of them over there in the White House put together — and experience is more important than intellect on foreign policy. For all his Biden-isms — and they are inevitable with Joe — he knows this business, and people can’t dismiss him very easily.”

Petraeus, whose reputation rests on the success of the Iraq surge, “didn’t like” the Biden-Gelb plan when it was proposed a few years ago, according to Gelb. But reports of a Petraeus-Biden clash are overplayed, he added, and the vice president is willing to give the general time to make his Afghanistan plan work before passing judgment.

Other rifts within the administration’s Afghanistan team are more pronounced, most notably the split between Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and State Department envoy Richard Holbrooke — the intended recipients of Obama’s get-along-or-else message in the Rose Garden.

In the past, Emanuel — whose office sits near Biden’s in the West Wing — has asked Biden to go on quiet peacekeeping missions to defuse such conflicts. Last year, for example, Biden went to Baghdad to help mediate a simmering dispute between the top Iraq commander, Gen. Ray Odierno, and Ambassador Christopher Hill, according to administration officials.

That, in turn, has led to an ever-expanding role on Iraq. With the help of Blinken, a former aide from his days as Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Biden runs the administration’s monthly meeting on Iraq. He frequently confers with a variety of experts on the conflict, including former Ambassador Ryan Crocker and former Bush aide Meghan O’Sullivan, and sits down for breakfast with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, although their schedules often get in the way.

Administration officials say Biden’s influence rivals Clinton’s on foreign policy issues in part because he’s learned to play by Obama’s rules: Be loyal and discreet.

“He’s not off the leash,” says an official who has worked closely with Biden.

But, alas, this is still Joe Biden, who regards the imperative of self-expression as second only to breathing and who can still annoy Obama with his off-script public ramblings and tendency to bloviate at big White House meetings.

Obama’s aides had to scramble recently when Jonathan Alter, in a new book on Obama’s first year in office, cited Biden as saying that a significant number of troops would begin leaving Afghanistan when the July 2011 target date arrives.

“Bet on it,” Biden said.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs questioned the context of the statement, Defense Secretary Robert Gates doubted its veracity, and Obama was forced to tell reporters he had no intention of “turning out the lights” in the region when the date arrived.

But more often than not, the White House has been able to leverage Biden’s skepticism to its advantage, especially when it comes to pushing back against the Pentagon’s efforts to pressure the president into accepting a more open-ended military commitment.

Last fall, when word leaked that McChrystal would request as many as 80,000 new troops for a stepped-up counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, someone in the administration responded with a strategic counterleak: Biden was pushing for a scaled-down surge, accompanied by an accelerated effort to combat Al Qaeda with drones and troops along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

That leak publicly established Biden’s role as what a senior administration official calls “the in-house skeptic.”

Several officials told POLITICO the leak didn’t come from Biden’s office but from someone in the White House who wanted to make it clear that the McChrystal plan — backed by his boss Petraeus — was too radical. “It was a train headed 80 miles an hour, and it needed to be slowed down,” one official said.

Obama eventually opted for a middle path in a speech last December at West Point, when he announced a surge of about 40,000 troops, renewed counterinsurgency efforts against the Taliban and a new timetable for withdrawal.

The decision was portrayed as a defeat for Biden. But if Petraeus is unable to show significantly more progress than McChrystal did, many observers believe that Obama’s only choice will be to adopt some form of Biden’s scaled-down strategy.

In other words, “Joe Bite Me” may bite back.

“He’s now a major player,” says Steven Clemons, a foreign policy expert at the nonpartisan New America Foundation. “The proof of his influence is the level of disdain he generated in the McChrystal camp.”